Start the day preparing rinse water. Boil a pot of tap water, then leave it to cool, covered.
Crush grain in Kitchenaid grain mill attachment, on coarsest setting.
Get HLT ready for strike water. Filtered tap water at about 160 degrees F (df).
Pre-moisten Irish Moss for adding to the boil later, about 1 tsp in 1/4 cup tap water. This is used for finings. The active ingredient is natural carrageenan, which gets removed with the cold break after the boil.
After mixing any salts into the crushed grain, mash by transferring water from the HLT into the mash tun. Salt additions are pretty straightforward any more: a half tsp CaCl for pilsners, a tsp of Gypsum for hoppy beers like IPAs, and 1/2 packet of Burton Water Salts for stouts and other very dark beers. Otherwise, not much need for salts.
Typically use 3 rest temperatures, 146-8 df, 150ish df, 154ish df, each rest with a different duration, depending on desired character of beer (longer time at lower temps for dryer beer, longer time at higher temps for sweeter beer). Total mash duration a little over an hour.
Mash temperature reading of ~154 df here:
Sparge and lauter using this home-made copper manifold that fits in the bottom of the Gott cooler used for mashing.
Prep 2 HLTs with sparge water, use filtered tap water at 170 df for sparging.
Push the manifold into the bottom of the grain bed, then start siphoning wort into the boil pot. Vorlauf (ie, return to the top of the grain) a gallon of the first runnings, to make sure no chunks of grain go into the boil. Want 6 or 7 gallons of wort into the boil, depending on the grains used.
For Pilsner and Munich, want a 90 minute boil to drive off DMS, so start with 7 gallons. For brewers 2-row malt, can go with a 60 minute boil, so start with 6 gallons.
Usually make pelletized hop additions at 60 minutes for bittering, and 5 minutes for flavoring, IPAs may have more frequent additions. Favorite bittering hop is Columbus. Flavor and aroma hops vary depending on style, what piques my interest at the shop, or the name is just cool and I want to try it. One favorite is Centennial, shown here.
Put the chilling coil in around the same time as the Irish Moss, about 15 minutes before the end of the boil.
At the end of the boil, move the pot onto the pedestal (one of the empty HLTs), hook up the PET hoses, and chill the wort. Occasional gently stirring helps hasten the chill, but careful not to aerate the hot wort.
Transfer chilled wort for pitching into sanitized milk jug for aeration before pitching. Fill jug about half way, seal it and shake vigorously about 25 times. Note today using a gallon of Starsan solution for sanitizing. Ordinarily on brew-day, fill half the sink with bleach solution (about a cup of household bleach, split between to carboys, then filled with water, left to sit for 1/2 hour, then poured into the sink to sanitize remaining equipment). Just out of bleach today, and using pre-sanitized carboys.
Pour the aerated wort into the carboys 1/2 gallon at a time. For this batch, just pouring the wort on the yeast cake from the last batch, which has been kept under seal in the carboys since packaging the last batch. For fresh yeast, add packet to 1 qt starter wort the night before brewing, then pour it in with the wort to pitch into clean, sanitized carboys.
Measure the strength with the hydrometer. 1.048 here, with temperature correction. Should make about 5% abv beer.
About ready to head to fermentation here, note bung with airlock:
Carboys snugged into fermentation chamber for heating.
Ale temp here is set to 70 df. The basement is about 60 df, so using the 'heating' feature of the temperature controller.
Filter-funneling the last of the cold break material into sanitized mason jars. I always keep a quart jar of wort in the freezer for starter wort. The rest will go into the carboy for fermentation.
Fermentation usually takes 2 weeks. For ales, leave the beer on the yeast for 2 weeks at desired temperature, then package it up (either bottling with table sugar for priming, or just kegging). For lagers, run primary at 55 df for 5-7 days, move to room temperature for 2 days for a diacetyl rest, then run secondary at 45 df for a week or so before kegging.
