Monday, February 27, 2012

Success and some failure to boot

So I did succeed in getting a beer brewed, I'm pretty pissed off about the amount of work to get the damn beer out of my keggle into my fermenter.  I have those sweet taps on the side of the kettle with awesome screens that should keep the adjunct fairies from gumming up my works, but I underestimated the power of 12 pounds of pumpkin guts.  It took more than 30 minutes from when I decided my beer was cool enough to transfer to get 5 and 1/6 gallons of wort out of that keg and I know I left another 1/2 gallon worth of liquid stuck in those pumpkin guts that clogged my kettle screen.

The new rule is adjunct stuff for beer goes in a motherfucking bag, I wanted nothing more than to be done last night and my beer was not letting me get into the house and cook dinner for my wife.  It was 45°F outside yesterday and I was out there for about 5 hours with little interruption, which is just me whining I know but damn it mother nature was not helping my cause.  My efficiency is still pretty piss at around 59% given my second wash of my grain gave me wort about 1 gallon with 1.058 OG so I made a tiny batch of Raspberry Leftover Ale.  After a boil I had a little more than 1/2 gallon of 1.078 OG to put in my growler and pitched my extra thing of Nottingham Dry Ale yeast and called it a night around 11:30pm.  Both beers where bubbling away this morning when I left, so we'll take success where it we can get it I suppose.

My taste of the unfermented sample tells me the pumpkin flavor is going to be huge, and I didn't get any cranberry taste at all so 3 lbs might not have been enough.  

7 comments:

  1. Gah, that sounds rough... lesson learned though, clogging isn't usually one of the things I consider when I think of beer brewing.

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  2. Anonymous1:13 PM

    I want to try that.

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  3. Haha, it really does sound like a lot of work to get beer.

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  4. I want to try it too, and it does sound time consuming.

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  5. Sounds like it's going well. Except for the cranberry part but I'm sure you'll get that settled.

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  6. sounds frustrating but hopefully all worth it

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  7. Hahaha, that's one reason why I prefer to just drink beer and not make them.

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