Extreme Brewing Session

[katzke]

Did a brew on Sunday and decided it may qualify as an extreme brewing session.

No it is not a hop bomb.

No it is not a single malt monster brew.

No it is not a brew pushing any limits of brewing.

Just a normal outdoor brewing session. I have a link to a picture here. http://i18.photobucket.com/albums/b145/tka...wing/eb1-7c.jpg

A BIAB brew of an Irish Red. You can see I use a converted keg. The small pot next to it is just for keeping stuff clean. It was our old brew pot and is just a large aluminum pressure canner. The picture was taken at the start and shows the general conditions as the mash water heats up.

I started late at about 3PM with a temperature of 7C and thinking the brew would cool quickly I did not worry about using a chiller. Big mistake as hot wort takes a long time to chill so I gave up at 11PM and the outside temp was down to 11C. My guess of how long it would take to chill was from observations of the brew day. Things like the mash spoon freezing with drops of wort on it. I even rinsed the bag out in hot water and left it setting in the spare pot to keep it clean and it froze solid to the pot. Had to spoon out hot water from the brew kettle to unstick it. The mash temp dropped lower then normal even with the pot wrapped up in an old comforter. A few minutes of the burner fixed that.

After transferring to my fermentation bucket I left the siphon in the brew kettle. It had a bit of wort left in a low spot and when I brought it in for clean up it was froze solid. The trub was still liquid but the handle of the brew kettle sure was frosty.

After 3 to 4 hours of setting in sub freezing temperatures and transferring to a cold bucket the wort ended up at about 32C. Let it set overnight and pitched a packet of dry English yeast and it is happily fermenting away.

To think last week everyone was wondering if winter would ever show up. Our club group brew was the week before and a balmy 15C. After 2 days of non-stop snow the sun is out and we are at a nice 16C. Nice part of all this is I can leave the keg in the garage and do not need a beer fridge. We may even get a white Christmas this year if the weather man gets it right.

 

[Fermented]

I don't envy you the cold one little bit.

It's nice to live in a place where the maximum temperature range (Greater Sydney) is -2C to 40C and even nicer to live in a part where it's only 8C to 35C (closer to the coast) and 20C +/- 5C most of the year.

Lotsa luck.

Cheers - Fermented.

 

[Swinging Beef]

I can not imagine what it would be like to live in a place where it snows.

I brewed yesterday outside in a pair of boardshorts.

 

[Adamt]

Soft...

Try -25C!

 

[raven19]

Brass Monkey weather eh?

I do like the associated snowboarding that comes with living in a place with such extremes in winter!

 

[Swinging Beef]

Snowboarding < Surfboarding

 

[stillscottish]

I can not imagine what it would be like to live in a place where it snows.

I brewed yesterday outside in a pair of boardshorts.

Doin it now.

Only problem is hot wort on a bare belly from vigorous stirring with my girly Wander "mash paddle".

Campbell

 

[katzke]

Ah, you softies with burn marks on your bellies from boiling wort.

The sun came out today and it got warm enough to melt the frost off the insides of the windows. It is 9PM and Yahoo says it is 3 below, that is 3F and it works out to really cold. I am not used to that dang metric stuff I used earlier. Just did the conversions so you did not have to use that neat plug in for Fire Fox that was given out some time ago. I can say that anything in the mid 20s is tolerable. When it gets into the low 20s it is cold and in the teens or lower we call it nose hair cold. That is because your breath freezes to your nose hairs. Never have done it but I think the low 20s is when you can stick your tong to a metal flag poll. Definitely will do it in the teens.

 

[newguy]

When it gets into the low 20s it is cold and in the teens or lower we call it nose hair cold. That is because your breath freezes to your nose hairs. Never have done it but I think the low 20s is when you can stick your tong to a metal flag poll. Definitely will do it in the teens.

Lemme tell you about two friends of mine who got a job at a winter drilling camp in northern Saskatchewan. They were fresh out of high school and they were the only two "greenhorns" that year. Their special greenhorn responsibilities included, among other things, something called "tipping the tower." One of them had to push over the outhouse, balancing it on one edge without actually tipping it all the way over. That was the good job. The other guy (let's call him the loser of whatever bet/competition they could dream up) had to use a 2x4 to beat the hell out of the frozen fecal stalagmite until it cracked and fell over. They used to refer to your nose hair cold weather as t-shirt weather.

That year also happened to have the coldest weather I can remember. One morning - Feb 2/89 to be exact - it was -56C with a 30mph wind with gusts to 45mph. And I had to drive 70 km to classes that morning. The drive actually wasn't that bad. The previous evening the trip home took over 2 hours when it usually only took about 35 minutes. There were long stretches that I couldn't even see the hood of my car. Blizzards aren't fun.