007 – Clementine’s Molasses Porter
Well, the day is here and it is time to find out if I can make a decent all-grain beer! I have my grains all converted and it is time to sparge as we speak! First a bit of catch-up:
The Recipe:
11 ½ lbs. pale malt
1 lb crystal malt (60L)
3/4 lb. chocolate malt
1/3 lb. black patent malt
1 cup blackstrap molasses
½ tsp Irish Moss
Hops:
2 oz. hallertauer (whole) @ 60 min
½ oz. Cascade (whole) @ 10 min
Yeast:
American Ale Yeast (Dry)
Target gravity: 1.060
Target IBU’s: 36.2
Method:
Step Mash
50 min at 147° followed by 1 hr 50 min at 153°. My 147° was a little closer to 149°. 153° was right on. I got this schedule from the book The Brewer’s Companion by Randy Mosher. This book is a must have when you get to all-grain!
Sparge
5 gallons of sparge water at 180° for a total of 45 min of time. It actually was only about 25 minutes…I’ll have to work on that and see how big a deal timing is on that. The sparge arm worked like a champ though! I may have drilled too many/ too big holes.
Boil
90 min boil with the following additions:
2 oz hallertauer at 90 min
1/2 tsp irish moss at 15 minutes
0.5 oz cascade at 10 min
The new burner seems to work alright and it looks like it is boiling away happily although I cannot see the liquid because of all the steam because it is only 30° outside…
Whoops! I only ended up with 3.5 gallons of wort after the boil. I’ll have to devise a better way of working that out…I added tap water to bring it up to 5.5 gallons.
Icooled with the wort chiller to 75° in 17 minutes. I pitched the yeast and then cleaned up.
Well, that was quite the experience. It gives me a new appreciation for extract brewing – it’s much quicker, that’s for sure. But it was a good experience and the beer will be wonderful. It’s a good feeling to know I took grains and made beer all by myself.
03/16/08
Today I racked Clementine’s Porter. I sneaked a taste and was very pleased. It is very chocolatey with just a hint of molasses. Very good indeed. The SG was 1.011. I will bottle next weekend.
03/23/08
I’m bottling Clementine’s Porter today. I’ve decided to do 3 gallons with the normal proportion of dextrose sugar, but for the other 2 gallons I am priming with molasses (at the rate of 1 cup per 5 gallons). I’m only doing two gallons of the molasses-primed stuff because I think it may overpower the beer. But it may be perfect – who knows…
Stiff Cider
After doing some reading on homebrewtalk.com I decided on trying a recipe for apple-cherry cider that sounds pretty amazing. (Thanks RICLARK!)
4G apple juice
1G cherry juice
1# light brown sugar
1# cane sugar
2 packets champagne yeast
I’ll just be doing a half batch, mainly because I only bought 2G of the apple juice at costco today and there’s no way in hell I’m going back again to buy more. The whole trip is made better by the amex pimps at the entrance and the exit too. (Sure I’ll take a free bottle of water for a 20% interest credit card. That’s a great f’ing deal!)
Anyways, I’ll post some pics when it gets brewing tomorrow. A link to the original recipe is below.
How To: Hot Liquor Tank Fly Sparge
A note on the following: I don’t actually endorse this anymore. I’ve quit using this setup because it didn’t work all that well. The reasons are as follows:
1) Under the assumption that we are attempting to fly sparge, sparge water will be coming out extremely slowly, and therefore the 3/4 inch pipe is both humongous and unnecessary.
2) I no longer believe in a strict fly sparge. What I do now is still kind of like a fly sparge, but is a bit if a batch sparge as well. Basically I’ll turn on the sparge water until it rises an inch or three above the grain bed. Then I’ll flip it off and let it drain until it is pretty close to grain bed level again, and then I will flip on the sparge water again and fill it more.
3) I have never had any issues with channeling or a stuck sparge. Ever. So I just let the water drip on in, not worrying terribly much about disturbing the grain bed. I use a stationary sparge arm assembly just to make myself feel better about getting the water gingerly on top of the grain. I’ve also seen it done by just piping a hose into a small tupperware that is sitting in the grain bed so as not to disturb things, and that works great too, and is free, as long as you have a small plastic container.
BUT, IF YOU MUST: here is the original post…
I keep saying that my all-grain setup is complete, but really it is an unending process of moving from ‘usable’ to ‘awesome’. So the improvement today before I do my first all-grain batch tomorrow (Clementine’s Molasses Porter), is a fly sparge system.
Fly sparging (as opposed to batch sparging) is where you have a constant stream of sparge water going in to the mash tun and match that rate out of the mash tun into your boil kettle.
Batch sparging on the other hand is adding a measured amount of liquid and then draining it, then adding more as necessary, and draining that.
Here’s what it looks like:
Here’s How I did it:
First I collected the parts:
- A big pot (mine is 6 gallons)
- Pipemaster 3/4″ ball valve*
- 2 Pipemaster 3/4″ connectors – one for CPVC and one for galvanized pipe
- about 5′ of 3/4″ CPVC
- CPVC cleaner, glue
- a 7/8″ I.D.(inside diameter) o-ring (the fatter, the better)
- a 3/4″ galvanized stainless steel elbow or straight piece with a female thread on one side – I change this because galvanized steel is not good to use, it rusts. You can still use the pipemaster steel connector on it though.
- 3/4″ CPVC connectors
- 5 elbows
- 1 ‘T’
*the pipemaster is the coolest valve I have seen for this type of project. It has a bunch of different ends (one for copper, PVC, CPVC, steel, etc) you put on either side so that you can have CPVC out on one end and galvanized pipe on the other. Ingenious! I got it at Lowes.
**A note on materials: I used the aluminum stock pot because I have it. Aluminum is not as terrible as people think and I have no problem using it for my sparge water. CPVC is good up to 200° and so it is fine for everything up to boiling, and sparge water doesn’t go hotter than 180°. Stainless steel and copper are both good, galvanized is not, it rusts (although it is used for water lines, so I’m not sure how that works).
The first thing I did was construct the CPVC aparatus. To do this, I placed the mash tun where it would sit (on the counter) and the hot water tank where it would sit (on the fridge). Then I measured out the horizontal distance to the edge of the mash tun and the verticle distance to just inside the mash tun. Here is where the two tanks sit ands where the sparge pipe needs to connect (from the metal top pot to the cooler):
These measurements were used to cut pieces of CPVC. remember to subtract the extra 1/2″ or so on each end that has an elbow or ‘T’ as these add length to the total end dimensions.
I then measured the inside of the mash tun to see how big to make the square part that actually releases the sparge water (for a 5 gallon cooler it ends up being a 6″ square). I cut out all the lengths together and dry fit them together to make sure I did it all right.Here is the dry fit all put together:
Now that everything looks good, I got ready to make it permanent. First, spread a little of the cleaner on both sides that will be glued, then put some CPVC glue on one side all the way around and shove the other end in until it won’t go any further. Do this for all of the joints. On the end that goes into the hot water pot, you glue on the special pipemaster CPVC connector. MAKE SURE YOU PUT THE NUT ON THE CPVC SIDE OF THE FITTING. I forgot, and it cost me a second trip to Lowes to pick up a $0.25 coupling so I could cut the CPVC and put the nut on. Here’s what not to do:
The next thing to do is cut the hole in your hot water pot. because I got the stainless steel elbow, I had to measure up to se where to drill the hole:
I marked the top of the elbow and added 1/4″ to have a bit of clearance on the bottom. Then drill a hole big enough to fit the steel pipemaster adapter through. After drilling, you will need to sand or file the hole to get it smooth so it wont chop off your finger. Then all you need to do is stick the pipemaster through the hole and put on the o-ring, then screw on the elbow:
The last step is to drill holes into the bottom square portion of the CPVC. I drilled holes straigth down and at 90 degrees both inward and ouward:
That’s all there is to it! Enjoy! You could build an apparatus that went over the top of your pot and down to the mash tun (think siphon), but that wouldn’t be nearly as cool. It’d keep your pot in one piece though.
Raspberry Liqueur – Make Chambord
Why go out and buy Chambord when you can make your own at a fraction of the cost?
I whipped up some liqueur a couple of days ago. I got the idea from the compleat Meadmaker (Ken Schramm). He uses it to add to meads to make melomels or adjust them by adding this good stuff. It is also just good by itself and for aging. It’s really simple and better than Chambord:
Raspberry Euphoria
A fifth of vodka (cheap and tasteless)
2 cups sugar
~3 cups raspberries
I just mixed that all up in a plastic container I got honey in and am letting it sit. The first couple of days, you want to mix it up a bit just to make sure the sugar gets mixed in, but after that you just let it sit for 3-4 months and extract all of the goodness out of the berries. Then you strain the liqueur and bottle it or use it or whatever you want to do. I just tasted some after 3 days and it is already quite wonderful! I wonder if it will make it to 3 months…
006, Alex’s Hard Lemonade (Better Name Pending)
I decided to give the lemonade a try. I didn’t really want to squeeze fresh lemons, but did want some good lemonade, so I took a trip to Whole Foods and got to shopping. The only fresh lemonade they had was the Whole Foods brand, 365, Pasteurized Lemonade. I got 1 Gallon Fresh Lemonade. I also scored about 9 lbs. of honey there, in the bulk foods section, for cheaper than the homebrew store can do ($2.29/lb instead of $2.50)! They also had three choices instead of just one – wildflower, clover, and something else. Sweet!
Anyway, I got home and whipped up a starter that consisted of 3/4 cup DME, about 1/3 gallon water, and and a packet of Lavlin EC-1118 (Champagne Yeast). 24 hours later, it was nicely bubbling away, so I sanitized the primary (a 3 gallon stainless steel pot) and got to work.
I added the lemonade along with 1/2 lb. Corn Sugar, and mixed them up. Along with it, I added my yeast starter. The total volume of the starter was just under 1/2 gallon giving me a total volume of about 1.5 gallons. I’ll let it sit and see how it does!
03/01/08
racked to secondary and recorded SG at 1.014
03/05/08
bottled. I did it a little bit hap-hazardously though. I added 3/16 cup priming sugar straight in (I was too lazy to boil it). I also added a little of the raspberry mead in there because it sounded good. It didn’t taste all that great either. I even forgot to take a reading on it. Oh well, it has to be about the same, as I saw no bubbles come out since I racked it.
Hard Lemonade
Well, this may seem a bit girlie, but I think it might be a good experiment and good to have around for the non-beer
fanatics. I found a recipe for Hard Lemonade! It’s really simple: just lemonade concentrate, sugar and water. The recipe I found was on homebrewtalk.com and is as follows (thanks USFBull):
- Enough lemonade concentrate(check label to make sure there is no potassium sorbate) and water to make 5 gallons. (10 cans)
- 2 pounds sugar
- 1 pound ultra light dme (more or less depending on target alcohol percentage)
- 1 pack champagne yeast
I think with some tweaking and prodding, this could be pretty good. I might try a gallon batch to see how it turns out.
Complete
Well, my all-grain setup is finally complete. My sister had a propane tank just chilling in the corner of her garage, and it turns out that she didn’t even want it! Wow, that is just one more thing I got free.
I need to add it up:
The mash tun and draining apparatus was $30. The Keg was $15 plus another $15 for cutting supplies and $35 for the stainless steel spigot. The burner was $40 which included a 30 gallon pot that I will use to boil water. I’ll even include the $8 I spent on a 3 gallon pot at the thrift store. I’ve got an all grain setup for under $150. I don’t know about you, but I think that is pretty good. I still want to build a sparge water distributer, but that shouldn’t be more than $15.
Thrift is part of the fun in this for me. I could just go buy the commercial stuff, but finding deals is half the fun!
A Good Day At the Thrift Store!
So I was at the Salvation Army thrift store today, and I scored a case of Grolsh swing-top bottles for $8 thanks to my lovely wife seeing them hiding out in the corner! I love using these for bottling, the only problem is they are so nice I can’t bring myself to give them away…I’ve got them in the sink soaking with bleach now. I usually don’t like to use bleach, but I was in need of a strong cleaner/sanitizer, and you can’t beat bleach for the price. They were pretty nasty, but I’ll let them soak overnight and hit them with the bottle washer and they’ll be good as new…
A note on SB²
So I took my light braggot/pale ale to the last Liquid Poets meeting, and was very surprised to taste the ginger was quite pronounced in it. I have only been drinking it in the Tap-A-Draft 6 liter bottles, and I am thinking that out of the bottle (normal beer bottles) it somehow picked up more of it. I’m not sure if that is really possible, maybe it just stuck out because I was trying to taste it critically and picked up on it…It’s amazing how different beer can taste in different circumstance. For example, I have been drinking just my SB² lately and then had some Buttface Amber at CB & Potts (The Ram for you Westerners) and it tasted very toasty, much more than I ever remember. I actually thought it was an odd batch until I thought about it for a second. It shed a new light on Ambers for me though.
I will also post this in the original SB² post. That is, after I go pour myself some.
IBU calculations
I learned something today thanks to a question from Alex about the IBU figure on the stout recipe I posted. It always seemed to me like the IBU figures were totally arbitrary, but apparently there is a formula on wikipedia here and a great explanation of it on the “How to Brew” website (a supplement to the book that kicks ass.) If you’re looking for a solid brewing book, I’d highly recommend it.
Next time I’ll calculate it out but I don’t have the AA figure for the hops now. According to the wikipedia link, the 60 IBU figure is definitely on the high side but not too crazy. All this talk about beer is really making me want to drink one, so the figure will just have to wait for now.
