Yellow Diamond Belgian Pale Ale setup and notes

Alright, here you have a multimedia presentation going on in this here blog, so the first picture I have to share is my 7.5 gallon stainless steel pot.  This is a lovely pot that is either too big or too small for all of my ambitions.  If you want to brew a 5 gallon batch you could (in theory) do an extract brew with this pot (you only need to do a 60 minute boil on extract) as this pot and my burner like to boil off about 1 gallon every half hour of boil.  Right now I am using to boil some water to raise the my beer from protein rest to scarification temps.

Here you see my converted keggle chilling out on the 20 minute protein rest.

For the 60 minute Scarification rest I wrapped the keggle up nice and snug to try and hold temperatures better.  The wrapping worked out pretty well I was only loosing 1 degree every 15 minutes on a 8 or so gallon thermal mass.  I let it drop down to 152 and then unwrapped and re-fired back up to 155 gave the whole thing a stir and re-wrapped.

So according to Beer Calculus my brew-house efficiency was 69% (2% better than before, but still kind of wimpy) to overcome this I nearly doubled my grist to get a higher OG at the end of the day.  I need to work out a cooler for giving the sour beer thing a try, with more than  30% of the sugar still hanging out in the grain it seems so wasteful to not chase after it at least a little bit.  I do think the lower than expected efficiency came from dough in not dropping my temperatures at all, according to the chart when I added my grain to the kettle the water was supposed to drop from 143°F down to 133°F instead my water was still 142°F.  I scrambled to make the temperature by adding nearly 1 gallon of cold water that was supposed to be for one of the later boils.

Another fucking tragedy at the end of the brew came with I tried to hook the hose up to my copper immersion chiller.  I need to take a picture of this thing, if for no other reason that I am really impressed with my handy-work.  The dick that was in charge of the cutter that cut the inside threads for my female to female 3/4in coupler needs to be punched in his dick.  Try though I might with several hoses none would get started on this set of threads.  I managed to back the damn thing off and flip it around  with just enough bite to let me get through my brew day, but I ended up wasting about 20 minutes fighting with the chiller.  It was much longer than I wanted to wait to start cooling my wort, so I only hope I cooled fast enough.   My final thought on this beer is I am very curious to see at bottling time if I managed to cool it off fast enough to get the cold break.  I might bottle one in a clear bottle just to see how much chill haze I get.