Monday Brew night

So after I got the porter put to bed and since I now have a small surplus of hops (natch) I headed down to the Brewstore to get some grain and to make an IPA.  After my big beer disaster I retreated to safer low sugar targets and thought I would focus on getting the hop character just right.  In spite of trying for me I ended up with too little water in the kettle again and at the end of the boil I found only 3.5 gallon in my fermenter.  Luckily given how inefficient the last few rounds have been with just simple infusion brew in a bag mashing I keep the grains around and put them in my smaller pot on medium heat and about 5 more gallons of water while I boiled the first runnings with the hops.  At the end of the boil I was pretty sure that there wasn't enough water, so I went and got the other kettle and brought it down to drain the grains and boil.

The hop sock with the leaf hops came undone in the first boil so I used the paint strainer to filter the first runnings when I put it into the fermenter so I dabbed all the hops in the second runnings while they boiled to get every last bit of hoppy goodness out of them, and since it was getting late and the pot had been sitting for so long with already rinsed grains at about 155°F for more than an hour I only did a 30 minute boil on the second runnings.  taken together I managed to get 73% efficiency this time around so I may take to having a second pot with a large amount of boiling liquid to dunk the grains into for better extraction.  I managed to get another 6% efficiency and had a larger batch to boot.

I realize all of this probably would make more sense with pictures, but I was busy trying to watch Game of Thrones while I was brewing so I didn't take any pictures.  I have one more beer I want to try and sneak in brewing before the wife pops.  I though having an Oktoberfest beer would be a fun middle distance beer and great way to celebrate the little one.  I suppose if my brain is still with me in November it probably will be cider and winter ale time.

Drying Hops and Serendipity

Sometimes I am starting to feel like the internet is just completely playing a theme song for me.  My wife's coworker is growing hops this season but doesn't want to brew beer this year (he's making wine and all of this resources are tied up in that) but he wanted to establish some hop trellis for when he does get back into brewing beer.  He knew that I was brewing and offered me the crop at the end of the season which depending on how big the crop is could be quite a bit of savings for my brewing endeavors.

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On average at my LBS 2oz of Hops is about $7, and depending on the brew you use more then one type of hop per beer. So you will use one as a bittering and another as an aroma so hops can add as much as little as $14 and considerably more if you choose to dry hop. Part of why the Mac and Jack's clone was so much was the recipe called for such high alpha acid hops that I had to adjust the volumes up to get the right AAU's and ended up with 3 packages of hops. Any way back to the serendipity of the internet, one of the blogs I follow The Mad Fermentationish just posted a pretty good bit of information on how to dry and store hops at home. So I didn't even have to go looking for this information, it just came to me via rss. Thanks Google.