Spicing up the White Ale
On Friday we brewed the third batch of Johns Grocery White Ale. We are quite happy with the recipe, but it still needs some tweaking. In the previous batches, we have added the freshly crushed coriander and orange peel directly to the kettle. After the brew, we have found large amounts of this stuff trapped in our heat exchanger. It also does not like to go down the drain. So this time we tied bags full of spices to a big metal stick, and hung that inside the kettle full of boiling wort.
Well actually I did not have enough bags, so I had to go to the store and buy some reinforced toe nylon stockings 
They look pretty silly, but they actually worked quite well! Well, they did get some runs in them, so they are not as reusable as the good nylon bags that we had.
Chris had to take apart and clean the heat exchanger last time, so he was quite happy to be doing this! This time I just took the spices out of the kettle, and mixed them into the spent grains. I bet the cows are going to really going to love their spent grains this weekend!
The real question is will we get the same amount of spice infused by doing this? I added the spices earlier into the boil to give them a longer extraction time. The wort tasted pretty spicy, but I will not really know until the beer is ready. We expecting labels to show up late next week, so hopefully it will be in bottles the week after that!