January 2, 2012 - All Grain Extravaganza!

Jake here in California...


With the completion of a 48-quart Mash Tun cooler conversion, my diabolical scheme to take over brewing the best homebrew in the Concord Valley has finally come to a head!


For some time now, I have been underwhelmed by the hit-and-miss of home brew extract beers. Some beers are disgustingly sweet and overly malty, while others are pretty decent. But as a rule, I have only met two or three home brewers who can make an extract beer I enjoy drinking in quantity, Dan being one of them. 


So, I tirelessly researched the all-grain process and started gathering the required equipment. I couldn't afford to buy my equipment from the brew store, so I built most of it from internet plans and YouTube videos.


Here is some of my equipment:

 My converted Spaten Munchen Keg Kettle

 The Keg Kettle on the Turkey Burner

The finished Counterflow Wort Chiller (worked AMAZINGLY well, down to 65 degrees)

The Mash Ten was an easy conversion. The cooler was a 48-quart Igloo Marine cooler for $24.95 at Wal-mart and about another $42.00 in parts from Home Depot finished it out for about $67.00 total. Here are some of the web pages I read to git-er-dun: 

http://www.brewingtechniques.com/library/backissues/issue5.4/palmer.html


Once I had the equipment built, I turned my attention to the beer. For starters, I decided to brew a Saison Fruit Clone. 


Here is the recipe:


Belgian Pilsner - 10 lbs, 4 oz
Clear Candi Sugar - 1 lbs, 0 oz @ 15 mins left
Briess White Wheat - 1 lbs, 0 oz
Aromatic - 0 lbs, 6 oz
Kent Goldings, UK Pellets - 1.05 oz @ 60 mins
Hallertau, German Pellets -  .4 oz @ 15 mins left
Coriander Seed - 2 oz. @ 60 mins
Brewer's Garden Paradise Seed - 1 oz. @ 60 mins
Sweet Orange Peel - 1 oz. @ 60 mins
Wyeast Labs Yeast, No. 3463 "Forbidden Fruit" - pitched at 70 degrees after chiller
2 quarts raspberry juice at secondary fermentation


The brew day lasted about 6 hours from start to clean-up, and I did an hour boil. The really interesting part was the Mashing, Lautering, and Sparging, since I had never done that alone, but it came out really well. I ran about 13 quarts of strike water at 152 degrees when I doughed in for about an hour, and then I sparged with about 5.5 gallons of sparge water at 170 degrees.  It took about 45 minutes to run through twice, and the liquor looked and smelled great.


I then returned the kettle to boil and threw in the spices and Kent Goldings for an hour boil.


The real interesting part was that I decided to use Belgian Candi Sugar (BCS), which is an invert sugar used to increase the S.G. without affecting the taste or mouthfeel of the beer. After seeing it on sale for $10/lb., I did as I always do and figured out how to make it myself at home.


Here's the video:

Mainline Brewers is awesome for it's Brewing Videos.

So I made a batch using their method, and it turn out well, but I decided to improve upon a good thing. I invented Saaz Hop Infused Belgian Candi Sugar. That's right, I made BCS with an oz. of Saaz Hops mixed in. An important note is that hops makes BCS foam like a mother, so you need a good pot and some patience to keep stirring, but the result is worth the trouble. Also, use wax paper, since you lose less BCS when you're cracking and you don't have little pieces of aluminum foil stuck in your sugar to worry about.

 The poured and chilled Saaz BCS ready to sugar.

 Sugaring the Saaz BCS for cracking.

1 pound of the finished product, bagged and ready to go.

Anyway, so all went well. The equipment worked, and sparging was actually fun. 

The beer is now fermenting away in the Ale Pail in my kitchen and seems to be going well.


I ran the calculations and found 1.040 O.G., which based on my grain bill, means I got about 57.6% efficiency from my Mash and Sparge. Not bad for a first All-Grain attempt. Here's the website: http://www.tastybrew.com/calculators/gravity.html

More updates soon with pics and videos.