First All Grain Batch

So tonight I got a wild hair up my ass and decided enough procrastinating, I am just going to go ahead and brew this cream ale recipe. I fired up the propane burners, rinsed out the mash tun and got to it.

My recipe called for a 20 minute rest at 133, so I added my grains to roughly 3 gallons of water at 140 in a kettle. I couldn't keep temps very well all day. After 20 minutes I turned up the burner and got the mash up to about 160 and then transferred the whole thing to the mash/lauter tun. about half way through I checked temps and it was down to 145ish, so I threw in half a gallon of nearly boiling water. That brought things back up to about 155. After I drained that into the boil kettle, I sparged with 4.5 gallons at 170ish for 10 minutes. I was about 1.040 out of the mash, so I hit target! I will figure my effeciency later, but rough guess is 75%. Not too shabby for my first time out.

I noticed the hops were kinda high alpha for a low gravity cream ale, so I boosted the OG about 8-10 points with a pound of DME so my starting gravity is 1.052. Looks like it will be around 5% ABV. Strictly speaking, this and the high hops bumps it from a cream ale up to a blonde ale, but no biggy. We'll see how it turns out after fermentation :)

Notes for the future: 5 gallon (instead of 10) mash/lauter tun for normal gravity beers, better thermometers - 2 of them, a cooling system, and more planning/less spontaneity.

Overall a fun time, but makes for a late night. I am still waiting for it to cool enough to pitch my yeast. Thankfully it's cold enough outside to help me out with the cooling.

Recipe:

7# 2 row
.75# honey malt
.25# Biscuit malt

1 oz cluster hops 60 min (7.7 AA)

Wyeast 1056