(brewed on 02/13/2011)
Water: Filtered San Diego tap
Grain:
Yeast: WLP001 - California Ale
Hops:
Mashed at 154 for 60 minutes. Boiled 60 minutes.
OG: almost 1.060
Ok, well, I actually brewed this a week ago and only finally got around to documenting it just now. The reason I'm calling it Hornbier I is that it's the first beer to use some of our home-grown Cascade hops from my parents' house up in Hornbrook (they smelled really good). Which I think is kinda cool. So back off man.
I'm also using some weird hops I've never heard of called "Super Alphas". I guess they're from New Zeland and apparently have kind of a piney taste to them. Since I was thinking that this was going to be a back-home kind of beer, I thought the pine flavor might be nice (also, LHBS was out of every other hop I was even vaguely considering). We'll see, I guess.
So anyway, this batch was the first time trying out the new (well, new to me) 10-gallon megapot brew kettle and a new replacement hose braid for the mash tun.
The new kettle is pretty nice, it's big enough to cover two of the burners on our stove and is made of stainless steel jacketed aluminum (like them fancy AllClad pans) which means it can get the liquid up to a boil in probably half the time of the pot I used to use. The real revelation was the replacement hose braid though. It turns out my old hose braid was not actual stainless steel but rather a incredible simulation... one that didn't really work for sparging. I replaced it with a length of actual stainless gas line hose braid and holy crap. Sparging used to take me between an hour and an hour and half. This time it was probably 20 minutes. Which is awesome.
There were a couple mishaps however. The more minor of the two was that I overshot my gravity by almost 8 points. Which kinda sucks since I didn't do any kind of starter. Hopefully it wasn't too hard on the yeast. The major mishap was that I didn't take out the bag of spent grain immediately and while I was doing other things the bag fell over and dumped tons of sticky proto-wort all over the floor. Luckily it was just on the tile, but it took poor Lynnea almost an hour to clean up.
I'm actually following this beer up with a barleywine today. So that'll be the next post. Later today. I think.
Matt on 02.20.11 @ 01:06 PM PST [link] [No Comments]
Water: Filtered San Diego tap
Grain:
- 9.25lbs British Pale
- 0.75lb Crystal 60
- 0.5lb Crystal 120
- 0.5lb Victory
Yeast: WLP001 - California Ale
Hops:
- 18g Super Alpha 12.7% @ 60min
- 14g Hornbrook-grown Cascades @ 10min
- 8g Centennial 8.7% @ 10min
- 14g Hornbrook-grown Cascades @ 0min
- 8g Centennial 8.7% @ 0min
Mashed at 154 for 60 minutes. Boiled 60 minutes.
OG: almost 1.060
Ok, well, I actually brewed this a week ago and only finally got around to documenting it just now. The reason I'm calling it Hornbier I is that it's the first beer to use some of our home-grown Cascade hops from my parents' house up in Hornbrook (they smelled really good). Which I think is kinda cool. So back off man.
I'm also using some weird hops I've never heard of called "Super Alphas". I guess they're from New Zeland and apparently have kind of a piney taste to them. Since I was thinking that this was going to be a back-home kind of beer, I thought the pine flavor might be nice (also, LHBS was out of every other hop I was even vaguely considering). We'll see, I guess.
So anyway, this batch was the first time trying out the new (well, new to me) 10-gallon megapot brew kettle and a new replacement hose braid for the mash tun.
The new kettle is pretty nice, it's big enough to cover two of the burners on our stove and is made of stainless steel jacketed aluminum (like them fancy AllClad pans) which means it can get the liquid up to a boil in probably half the time of the pot I used to use. The real revelation was the replacement hose braid though. It turns out my old hose braid was not actual stainless steel but rather a incredible simulation... one that didn't really work for sparging. I replaced it with a length of actual stainless gas line hose braid and holy crap. Sparging used to take me between an hour and an hour and half. This time it was probably 20 minutes. Which is awesome.
There were a couple mishaps however. The more minor of the two was that I overshot my gravity by almost 8 points. Which kinda sucks since I didn't do any kind of starter. Hopefully it wasn't too hard on the yeast. The major mishap was that I didn't take out the bag of spent grain immediately and while I was doing other things the bag fell over and dumped tons of sticky proto-wort all over the floor. Luckily it was just on the tile, but it took poor Lynnea almost an hour to clean up.
I'm actually following this beer up with a barleywine today. So that'll be the next post. Later today. I think.
Matt on 02.20.11 @ 01:06 PM PST [link] [No Comments]
