Late Night Brewing
You can feel safe, because late at night, when your asleep i’m here brewing! The next two days, and most of next week, we are going to be doing 24hr brews to get this beer done for the beer club. That means I brew 12hrs at night, and Chris gets 12hrs during the day. I’m a night owl, so I actually really enjoy it. Now that we have Millie to keep me company, its not lonely at all!
Thankfully everything is going pretty well. The Oatmeal Stout is running off pretty fast. Recently Chris and I devised a way to get the rice hulls in a bed below the rest of the mash in the lauter tun. This is giving us record runoff times, in order of 2 and half hours, where before the stout has been more like 4 hours to runoff into the kettle. I’ve also been using the new automatic temperature controller that we have on the mash tun to get up to conversion temperature faster too. Now when I’m done mashing in, the mash is usually right at the temperature I want as soon as I’m done with the mill and get downstairs. It used to take another ten to fifteen minutes to adjust the temperature. Those minutes really add up when you are trying to do four brews a day!
In my spare time, I have been updating the webpage. I have been trying add more content to the about our beers page. Each beer now has a basic recipe, including the ABV (alcohol content). This is a good thing for me to put on the page, because I really don’t pay much attention to it. Most of the time when i’m asked, I really have no idea what alcohol percentage a particular beer is. Its really not important to me, but it does seem to be common question. Going through my records, it turns out that the Maifest and Warsh Pail Ale are our two strongest beers. This makes sense, I guess, because they are both big beers with high attenuation. Attenuation might seem like a big word, but for us brewers, it refers to the completeness of fermentation. Beers that have lots of unfermentable sugars such as those from carmelized malts, don’t attenuate as far. Also, some yeast strains tend to stay afloat longer and ferment more of the available sugars than others, and are thus, more attenuative. The Maifest is a pretty big beer, with no caramel malts in inhibit full attenuation, and the Warsh Pail uses the California V ale yeast strain, which is much more attenuative than our lager strain. Our Schild Brau and Stout have very low attenuation, due to the large amounts of caramel malts in them. I’m happy if either reaches 68% attentuation (apparent degree). The Warsh Pail and Wheat, on the other hand, usually reach 75%. This is how I keep track of fermentation. Its not important what the final gravity is, because that is dependent on what the original gravity was. If you have the two measurements though, you can calculate the attenuation, which will tell you when your fermentation has reached completion.
Ok, that was a bit technical. So getting back to web pages, I’ve updated our links page with links to every Iowa Craft Brewery that actually has a web page. Sadly, I only found two breweries, so I added two Illinois breweries from the Quad Cities (thats Iowa right?) for good measure. I wish more breweries would get online. I have yet to find another brewery running a blog such as myself. If any of you Iowa Homebrewers are running blogs, send me an email and i’ll link you to my page. The only one I know of us is here Trailer Trash Brewing. Appropriate for Iowa right?