Brew. Brew! BREW!

This past Saturday, my brewing team and I had our craziest yet most productive day of homebrewing yet. We've been brewing since September 2007 and we rarely find time for it on weekends, usually we have to cram it all in after work on weeknights. Anyways the slate for this dreary Saturday included not only bottling our 3rd Anniversary Barleywine that we brewed at the end of September, but also brewing the biggest (ABV-wise) beer we've ever attempted. We did some research about clone recipes of the infamous Three Floyds Dark Lord Imperial Stout and formulated our own:

Ingredients
19lb 2 row ---mash
2lbs Munich malt ---mash
.5lb flaked oats ---mash
.5lb special B ---mash
.5lb Flaked Barley ---mash
.5lb Crystal 60L ---mash

2lbs Roasted Barley ---steep
1.5lb Chocolate malt ---steep
.5lb Crystal 120L ---steep
.5lb Black patent malt ---steep

2lb honey ---boil
1.25lb molasses ---boil

2oz Super Styrian 7% (75 min)
1oz Nugget 13% (75 min)
1oz UK Fuggle 4% (75 min)

1 pack US-04 dry ale yeast
1 pack US-05 dry ale yeast

?lb coarse grind coffee, cold-steeped 12 hours just prior to bottling
2oz medium toast american oak beans, steeped in Jack Daniels for 2 weeks

target OG: 1.154 target FG: 1.039 target ABV: 14%

Procedures
- 7 gallons mash liquor, strike temp 165º (23lbs mashing grain bill, 1:1.22 grist ratio)
- 2.5 gallons absorbed by grain <----NOTE: grain bag absorbed X2 as much as mash grain
- 152º mash for 90 mins
- 3.25 gallons sparge @ 175º to collect 7 gal pre-boil <---less than expected
- Begin 2nd runnings
- steep remaining 4.5 lbs dark grains in grain bag under 160º for 30 mins
- 75 minute boil, add all hops @ 75 mins
- final volume = 5.75 gallons (1.25 gallons lost in boil)

O.G.: 1.130

-----------------
SECOND RUNNINGS
- 6.25 gallons additional sparge, 6.25 collected
- grain bag steeped 1 hour during main boil (approx. 140º)
- 60 monute boil
1oz UK Goldings (60 min)
.5oz UK Goldings (30 min)
.5oz UK Goldings (15 min)
1oz Crystal 3.8% (0 min)
- wort left to stand for 6 hours to cool
- 1 pack Nottingham dry yeast pitched
- fermented @ 66-68

O.G.: 1.050

As you can see above, we missed our O.G. but not by all that much. The second runnings brew is our first time experimenting with that, so if that turns out well we'll consider that a bonus beer. Of course its fun homebrewing, but it definitely makes us all wish we could have a larger space for all our stuff. We really take over wherever we brew as you can see.



All in all, it was about a 7 hour day, but hopefully worth it. If it tastes ANYTHING like Dark Lord, it will be considered a success.

Barleywine #3: Transfer to Secondary

We finally got around to transferring our Number 3 barleywine that we brewed a few weeks ago. It had exploded despite our addition of a blowoff tube, so we really braced ourselves when tasting it. Surprisingly, it tasted GOOD! And right now it's sitting at about 8.5%, which is lower than we tried for with the recipe, but we chalk that up to adding 5lbs of malt that was probably too old. After accounting for those 5lbs, we pretty much hit our mark dead on.

You can see above how much trub ended up all over the primary fermenter. I don't think I've ever seen so much of it on the underside of the lid before.

Can't wait to be drinking this in the winter months!

The Perils of Homebrewing

WHOA! So, if you happened to be following my tweets the other night, you already know that we brewed our first all-grain barleywine. This has accidentally ended up as our brewing-anniversary beer, as we brewed an excellent barleywine last September for our one year anniversary. So this time around, we've grown up and are using all grain rather than malt extract. Of course, when you use 23lb of grain for a 5 to 6 gallon batch, your fermenter is going to end up PRETTY FULL by the end of the night. We figured that a blow-off tube would be necessary, but apparently that wasn't enough. The lid was actually blown off the top of the bucket, so who knows what kind of nasties may have gotten into the beer and how this is going to end up tasting. Oh well.

In the meantime, we had done a second runnings which involves sparging a second time to try to make use of the huge amount of grains. Of course, we didn't have enough space on the stove to boil both, so we figured we'd cover the second-running-wort and boil it the next day. AMATEUR MISTAKE! It was mold city by the morning. Lesson learned.