4hr Brewday?

[wee stu]

From now on some of these times are very approximate. The brew day is turning surreal :blink:

7.47 am back to the laundry. Unload machine from last night. Put another load in. Hang our the first load

7.54 am First runnings complete. Let in the batch sparge. I am now very grateful that I splashed out on the 30L urn. It makes single batch sparges the go.

8.05 am Recirculate until clear. Hooray, no sticky this time.

8.07 am Start sparge run off. Then leave the house and go and get "Mr Muscles".

Mr Muscles, AKA the brother in law, is a very important part of my brury, if an under paid one. I am a ghetto brewer, and proud of it. Nor for me the flashy rims and herms systems with march pumps marching as to war. No mine is a gritty and basic three tier gravity system, with the kettle obeying gravity and collecting wort on the brury floor. Sadly for gravity to play its part later with the counter flow chiller it needs to get from the brury floor to the raised burner, and I aint lifting it alone - hence Mr Muscles. Until last week we had a cool arrangement, he lived with us and the only rent was a few domestic chores, including brury assistance .
Last week Mr Muscles left home left home and moved into trust accomodation a street away. He has been doing things a bit hard recently and currently has no phone, so contact has to be in person. Hence, off I trot.

8.09 am Entering the trust complex I come accross a lady who must be in her Nineties, trying to handle her zimmer walking frame with one hand and her wheely bin in the other. Enter good samaritan wee stu!

8.11 am, call in in on Mr Muscles who is almost up and ready for me. Leave him and head beack to put the kettle on for his coffee

8.13 am Stumble across a discarded sportstab ticket in the middle of the road. It is for Richmond to beat Port last night. Must be good karma for the samaritan - wee stu is now $27 better off.
$27 is, coincidentally, the amount it cost to get my spare gas bottle refilled last night - during the Port Richmond game :huh:

8.15 am Back in time to catch the last of the sparge run off. make some coffees and wait for Mr muscles!

 

[dicko]

Stu,
We are all waiting with anticipation.
I hope this is not continued next week end. :lol:
Cheers

 

[wee stu]

8.20 am. Dump spent grain on the compost heap and wash out the mash tun.

8.24 am. I have time to smell the roses while waiting for Mr muscles to arrive. Bad move, there are no roses, only overgrown thorn bushes! Reminds me of what I am supposed to be doing with my Sundat!!

8.25 am Mr Muscles arives

8.26 am check the gravity going into the kettle, spot on the calculated 1.044

8.28 am Kettle is on the burner and flame on. This is somewhere I am going to lose time. My ghetto blaster is no nasa . Add to that I have left the reg set at the level I use to keep a rolling boil going and not full bore for gettting to the boil. Ah, well.

8.35 am HLT packed up and put back in its box for storage.

8.45 am check how far off the boil I am, notice the gas rego blunder and am grateful this is not happening on skype!

8.50 am Go inside and prepare the ingredients for family breakfasts. Super fast, very easy mini egg and bacon muffin-pies. A Sunday favourite.

8.55 am measure out the hops. Something I meant to do last night. 115g of spalt. Just one addition at 60min

8.58 am boil is on, skim hot break

9.02 am hops are in. WOW!!, does that smell nice, or what?? House rule says no beer until last hop edition. Not even i can come at a beer at this time in the morning. Have one of my daughter's ginger beers instead.

9.15 am muffins in the oven

9.35 am rest of family get breakfast in bed.

 

[tangent]

sounds like you need a superstu cape and undies on the outside Stu.
wheelie bin and breakfast duties done while us mere mortals are still asleep.

 

[wee stu]

9.45 am Flush the CFWC out with boiling water, followed by some phos.

9.50 am Remember the whirlfoc. What is it with whirfloc? If do remember it, it is normally too late. Want to use it this time though. My alts have all had clarity problems.

9.55 am Add the whirlfloc, and give it 15 minutes

10.10 am Flame out and whirlpool.

10.15 am Hang out more washing, put in some more.

10.25 am Let the chilling begin. Fast run in water, slow run out wort.

10.30 am do some tidying up around the brewhouse.

10.45 am Chilling is complete, 24L of 1.055 (blow me if its not on the money again) Alt wort at 22c. Just at the upper level for 1338 European

10.50 am - Kettle cleaning. Even being careful, 115 of hops at 60 minutes makes some mess.

11.00 am - Flush CFWC with boiling water and phos.

11.05 am Have a bloody rest and some more ginger beer, watch a bit of the Sunday Footy Show.

11.25 am pack away the rest of the brewing gear for another day.

11.30 am Finish telling this tale.

Is a four hour brew day possible? Yes.
Is it possible in wee stu's brury. Probably not

If I had put the HLT on a timer and had the water ready, I would have shaved off a half hour and could claim a 6.30 am start.

If I had not been a slack arse and completed the cleaning at 11.05, I could have claimed a notional 4h35m day.

Also, I chose to do a 75 minute mash, which would not be the norm. Getting to boil took longer because of no NASA and my own peculiar inattention to detail. Forgetting the whirlfloc added an extra few minutes to the boil. And, I did pack in a lot of other activity.

11.55 am finish this sentence and go and get a real bloody beer :beer:

 

[Weizguy]

I started a batch on Saturday morning and my beer wasn't finished until the end of the day. No short brew days at my house; not with my equipment.

I'd just finished the lautering into the kettle and started to make myself some lunch when Stephen arrived to collect me for the BJCP learning session at 2PM. He helped me to cover the top of the kettle with foil and secure it to the kettle with plastic wrap. Hoped the kids didn't get into it.

When I arrived home, around 8:30PM (it's about 40 min drive each way) I started the boil. Took a while to get there on my old burner and I had to reduce 40 l down to 30 l. It was a long boil. The (MHB) Hallertau Mittelfrueh plugs were broken up and went in for the last 60 min. Very nice aroma, too. No Whirfloc, though...c'mon, it's a Weizen, a hefeweizen. The way I like it! :beerbang:

I learned that my boil was too long, so I'll have to adjust that in my Beersmith. The wort was drawn off at a temp above 80 C, into a 20l jerry can and a fermentor. I got 25 l at 17 Brix (about 1.068).
After the no-chill wort was cooled - overnight on my back verandah at close to freezing - I distributed the wort between 2 fermentors and topped each one up to 16 litres. This gave me a final volume of 32 litres of triple-decocted weizen wort at a bitterness of 9.7 IBU and OG of about 1.053. Certainly in the range for the style.

I pitched one fermentor with a 1.25 litre PET bottle yeast culture, and the other with a 600 ml PET bottle of yeast culture; both were W3068. I aerated quite well with the big culture and somewhat less with the smaller culture.

What do I hope to achieve? Maybe we'll see if underpitching and low aeration contributes to more esters in a weizen, in my setup anyway. This may help me get the added banana that beer judges tell me I need.

*Edit: Apologies if this post is too off-topic, as it contains elements of myth-busting, "No-chill" and other elements of my brewery components, with some of my observations and things I have learned with this brew to tune my technique and my brew software.

Seth out