BIAB Heather Ale and Mead Too!

Happiness is 5 gallons of ale and 10 gallons of mead fermenting in my basement...

After being stumped and stopped at every turn yesterday, I had a great thought while out buying water for brewing last night. I picked up a bag to do brew-in-a-bag. Brew in a bag is a pretty neat thing that the Aussie home brewing community came up with as a super cheap way to do all grain brewing. For 5 bucks you can buy a bag big enough to line your boil kettle. Then you just mash your grain in place and lift out the bag and squeeze out any remaining water/wort from the grains.

At 10AM I put the bag inside my kettle and started up the flame. At 10:57 I started the mash. I mashed at 155F for 60 minutes. I had a moment of clarity and wrapped the kettle with the electric blanket, so I only had to reheat it once at 45 minutes in, and I probably could have skipped that.

While I was setting up the mash, I heated up the honey for my second batch of mead. While I was heating up the mash to mash out temp, I racked my first batch of mead over to secondary and put 4 gallons of water and 4 quarts of honey on top of the leftover yeast. Hopefully this will be a nice low cost, low maintenance method for making a second batch. My gravity on this batch is pretty low, 1.070, so will be adding fruit to this at some point to help boost it up.

At 1:04 the boil started rolling and I added an ounce of UK Golding hops and an ounce of heather tips. I didn't have much of a problem with boil overs thanks to a little bit of breeze. AT 15 minutes left I added irish moss and the immersion chiller to sanitize it. At less than 5 minutes I added the remaining ounce of heather tips. It all went along pretty well. After flame out I started the water running through the chiller. It only took 20 minutes to cool from boiling to 65F.

One thing I seriously underestimated was how much the heather would reconstitute in the boil. The bottom 2-3 inches of the kettle was all hop debris, heather tips and trub. It took forever to run the wort into my carboy because both the spigot on my kettle and my siphon kept getting clogged. In the end I came in 9 points short of what I was shooting for at 1.041. This should still net around a 5% ABV beer.

Three things jump out as lessons learned. Use a hop bag with heather tips, they are like little wort sponges; Crush grains finely for BIAB, it should really help with efficiency; Do not attempt to make a mead in the middle of brewing a beer.

I started at heating strike water at 10AM and I was done with cleanup by 3:15. That makes a 6 hour brew day, which is about normal for me. I did basically 2 brews in that time however. I like the brew in a bag method, but I still want to try a parti-gyle in my 10 gallon mash tun cooler.

Pics:

The bag with the grain inside a basket hanging over the kettle.


Me squeezing the grains



Mixing the mead

Brewing Issues and 1st Heather Ale

One function of this blog is to be a sort of brew log for me. That's where this post is coming from. I was planning a big parti-gyle brew today, but that has gone by the wayside as I will explain below. I instead am going to make a heather ale tomorrow.

Recipe:

8lbs Maris Otter
.5lb Biscuit Malt
1lb Crystal 80L

1 oz old EKG hops at 60 min
1 oz heather tips at 60 min

1.5 oz heather tips between 5 min and flame out.

WLP001 Cal Ale yeast

Mash notes:
3 gal mash
5.5 gal sparge
~6.75 gal for start of boil
~5.2 gal to fermenter

I am going for a very clean beer, few esters, so I can see just what the heather does. It will have a nice malty/caramel character somewhat similar to a Scottish 80 shilling hopefully. I may even cut back on the EKG hops. They are old so there is not much of a bitterring charge to them. We'll see.

As for my attempted brew day today...

I got a corona style grain mill so I would be able to brew whenever I wanted. Unfortunately my hand-held drill that I was planning to power my ghetto-wonderful grain mill that I built is not powerful enough. So not only did I have to alter my monstrosity to finish it by hand, I also now cannot stir up the honey and water that I had planned to put on the yeast from my mead to get a second batch going. (My aeration stir paddles run off my drill too, and it is currently recharging.) The moral of this story is that you should buy a good drill. The good news is that it looks like I got a good crush out of the set up. That at least is encouraging.

So I am going to finish off my specialty grains here in a second and figure out how much water I will need for tomorrow, probably around 13 gallons if I tackle the mead racking too. Anyways, wish me luck.

ttfn

Quick Hits

Just posting a couple quick things.

I tested the mead I made a month ago yesterday. I have completed fermentation in one month. I am very happy about this. It started off with a specific gravity of 1.083 and was at 1.000 when I tested it. This makes it right at 11% ABV. I will rack it off the lees and let it age for a few months now. This will give the yeast that are still in suspension time to finish off the acetaldehyde to tame the green apple taste and mellow the alcohol taste since it is kinda hot right now. I think I may put half of it on fruit too, but finding quality fruit at this time of year is tough, so I may have to wait on that.

Hockey season is over. Syd's team won their final game. I missed it due to work, but I hear she had a good clear out during the game. All that is left is the year end banquet and the game against the parents, which I will not be participating in. Syd has been talking about playing softball, so we'll see if we can't get her into a league.

Ian is still excited for the choir trip. We are in a holding pattern pretty much until he leaves for DC. Once he gets back his priority (other than his grades) will be finding a job. I have not informed him of this yet however, LOL.

I need to sit down and pull the video off the camera that I have of Ian's choir and Syd's hockey. It just so tedious I have not been able to motivate myself to do it yet.

The soda making was a pretty good experience. We put 8 two liter bottles of cherry soda and 2 two liter bottles of grape soda into the fridge in the garage. Should be ready to try next week.

I saw this quotable rogue and am posting it here to save it, though I think I may already have it somewhere:

Behind every great fortune there is a crime.
- Honore de Balzac

ttfn

20 questions

Just a little test that I want to save. I will do more with it later.

1. I don't like being told what to do by people who are less capable than I am.
2. I like challenging myself.
3. I like to win.
4. I like being my own boss.
5. I always look for new and better ways to do things.
6. I like to question conventional wisdom.
7. I like to get people together in order to get things done.
8. People get excited by my ideas.
9. I am rarely satisfied or complacent.
10. I can't sit still.
11. I can usually work my way out of a difficult situation.
12. I would rather fail at my own thing than succeed at someone else's.
13. Whenever there is a problem, I am ready to jump right in.
14. I think old dogs can learn — even invent — new tricks.
15. Members of my family run their own businesses.
16. I have friends who run their own businesses.
17. I worked after school and during vacations when I was growing up.
18. I get an adrenaline rush from selling things.
19. I am exhilarated by achieving results.