Friday, March 2, 2012

Friday morning Kolsch

6:20am
It's brew day this morning. I plan to update the blog as I go through my process this morning. Weather is cool but will get warmer this morning. I may need to cover the mash tun to keep the mash temps just right. Time to get the equipment out, measure water, and light the burner. Let's make some beer.

7:15am
Today may be a bust, my burner isn't working. Checked it with 2 propane tanks. The regulator seems to not be passing any gas through it. At first I thought maybe the propane tanks were frozen but that's not the case, they work fine on the grill. I might have to make a quick trip at 10am to MD Homebrew and see if they have any burners in stock. That will significantly delay me this morning, was hoping to have this batch in the fermenter by noon in order to have a nice afternoon playing with the kiddos. I guess I will just have a few brew buddies while we finish it up. I didn't make any sort of yeast starter, the only thing is I milled my grains already so I am on somewhat of a time schedule to get this brewed. I could wait until tomorrow morning or get a burner and do an overnight mash tonight and just run off and boil in the morning. Never done that before though so I'm not sure the results. I'll post back when I figure out what the plan is.......

8:15am
I'm going to get go get the new burner. Not many other options other than taking my chances at Lowes or Home Depot. Check back around 11-12 when I will get started. Disappointing but it's just a snag. Beer will be made today!!!

Pics of the bad burner:



11:05am
After getting a new burner I am back up and running. Mash water is heating right now. I got the Bayou burner as that's really all they had. I've heard decent things about it so hopefully it will be part of many batches to come.

11:30am
I'm all mashed in, the new burner didn't take long to get the water heated although it wasn't a ton of strike water. I measured out my infusion water already and my sparge water. I hit my temp right at 150 but covered the mash tun with a blanket to try to keep it there. Should be perfect if I only lose a degree or two during the mash. Pics of the new burner below:


3:38pm
Everything is done for the day, a little longer than expected but not bad. In the end I hit a 1.042 gravity which was a bit low for what I was expecting. Could have been that the mash temps dropped too much. Should have started on the higher end instead of 150, maybe 154 and let it drop down to 150/149. I have to figure out why I lost to much heat in the mash tun. Maybe it's warped from all of the use. It got colder as the day went on today and the wind didn't help. My chiller worked out great though and had my wort cooled very quickly. I took videos all of the way through so I am in the process of downloading those and making one big clip to post up. Should have that up within a few hours. Hopefully this beer turns out, it seems the gods were against me a little bit today with the broken burner and then having a boilover. That's the first time that's ever happened to me. I think it's time to go enjoy a brew for the hard work ;)


Untitled from Chris Trompeter on Vimeo.




2 comments:

Unknown said...

Dude! Feel free to call me about stuff like this. You could have borrowed a burner until you got another!

Chris Trompeter said...

thanks man. It was kind of a hellish morning. I think I can replace the regulator on this one and it will be ok. We'll see. I just uploaded the video of the brew day.