murrayr
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- 23/10/09
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Did my 50th brew yesterday. thought i'd make it something special...a belgian quadrupel.
should be a good day, what could possibly go wrong?
first drama didn't take long as my urn was heating up the water the adapter managed to melt itself into the socket and short out the house. bit of a set bacck, but i persevere. Heated up the water in my kettle instead and used smaller pots for sparging.
when the mash did come to a close i was delighted to find i had a stuck mash, never happened before so i was a bit shitting myself. had a mate help me empty my mash tun to fix up my false bottom/tap fittings to get it running again. old murphy was in force that day and a second stuck mash soon ensued. yay.
got that fixed and it was on to sparging. never done a brew with such an ambitious expected OG before (about 1.100) and after sparging what i needed pre-boil, it was still coming out at 1.040. keep sparging i thought and i'll boil it off. when i was done and the run off finally got down to about 1.015 i had over 45 litres of wort for a batch to be 23 litres. for this i split the batch in to 2 pots. one i had slowly coming to the boil on my stove inside while 20 litres i put on my big new outdoor burner to hopefully bring it down to a useable quantity.
turn out my brand new burner has a small leak where the manufacturer welded the burner to the stand. in finding out this fun fact i was able to lose my left eyebrow....going good.
after sorting that out i was eventually able to burn the 20 litres down to about 3 litres in about 2 to 3 hours...those burners are seriously strong. when i was done it was almost the consistency of liquid malt extract. anyway i added this back to the rest of the wort and finished up the brew as usual.
quite a day. turned my usual 7 hour brew day into 11 hours of havoc.did manage to finish with exactly 23 litres and an OG of 1.095, not too far under my target 75% efficiency.
so that's my tale of my first real brew day gone bad.
the lesson, don't use a cheap japanese adapter for your hot liquor tank.
murray
should be a good day, what could possibly go wrong?
first drama didn't take long as my urn was heating up the water the adapter managed to melt itself into the socket and short out the house. bit of a set bacck, but i persevere. Heated up the water in my kettle instead and used smaller pots for sparging.
when the mash did come to a close i was delighted to find i had a stuck mash, never happened before so i was a bit shitting myself. had a mate help me empty my mash tun to fix up my false bottom/tap fittings to get it running again. old murphy was in force that day and a second stuck mash soon ensued. yay.
got that fixed and it was on to sparging. never done a brew with such an ambitious expected OG before (about 1.100) and after sparging what i needed pre-boil, it was still coming out at 1.040. keep sparging i thought and i'll boil it off. when i was done and the run off finally got down to about 1.015 i had over 45 litres of wort for a batch to be 23 litres. for this i split the batch in to 2 pots. one i had slowly coming to the boil on my stove inside while 20 litres i put on my big new outdoor burner to hopefully bring it down to a useable quantity.
turn out my brand new burner has a small leak where the manufacturer welded the burner to the stand. in finding out this fun fact i was able to lose my left eyebrow....going good.
after sorting that out i was eventually able to burn the 20 litres down to about 3 litres in about 2 to 3 hours...those burners are seriously strong. when i was done it was almost the consistency of liquid malt extract. anyway i added this back to the rest of the wort and finished up the brew as usual.
quite a day. turned my usual 7 hour brew day into 11 hours of havoc.did manage to finish with exactly 23 litres and an OG of 1.095, not too far under my target 75% efficiency.
so that's my tale of my first real brew day gone bad.
the lesson, don't use a cheap japanese adapter for your hot liquor tank.
murray
