Mon Mar 28, 2016 1:23 am
Brewed a SMaSH Blonde/Pale ale with Golden Promise and Horizon. Using a house yeast from a local brewery. Clusterfuck of a brewday, otherwise I'd have posted during.
First off, I woke up hungover with a lack of sleep. Made some homemade Terrapin Wake-N-Bake coffee blend from the CYBI show ages ago, and everything up to dough-in was good. While stirring the mash it smelled like cheez-its (always a plus in my book) and I nailed my mash temp, but then things got fucked up. My sparge water salts didn't get mixed well enough in the HLT, and they ended up sitting in the middle of the pot like a sweaty stack of pancakes. This created a nice little moon-surface-esque pitting pattern that impregnated the 6 gallons of sparge water with a horrible rusty odor and flavor. 75 minutes into my 90 minute mash, I realize that I have to toss the sparge water and scrub the everloving shit out of my HLT. Undaunted, I bust out the barkeeper's friend and green scrubbie and go to town on this poor kettle for a good 25 minutes. There is still a pit in the middle of the pot, with a few of its smaller accomplices, but thankfully there is no more corrosion. I fill the pot, crank the burners, and slap the lid on it. After 2 hours of mashing at 155, I decided to drain the mash into a smaller pot and hold it.
From here, things begin to smooth out. I batch sparged and ran off onto 21g of Horizon for FWH, and hit my pre-boil volume. I was 2 gravity points high but that's no big deal, I've [something clever that explains that 2 points of gravity over what's expected isn't a big deal]. Boil was no biggie, hops went in when they were supposed to and none of them escaped their fate, so my timer was working, which is a good thing. I used Whirlfloc for the first time, which is a badass product. My trub was a nice condensed cake after whirlpooling and I got the clearest wort I'd ever been able to get. Its performance far exceeded Break Bright. I expect the check from whoever the mysterious manufacturer of Whirlfloc is to arrive sometime mid-week.
So I had my pitch of house yeast in the fridge in a dumb little half-pint jar inside a plastic baggie, but when I filled it, I must have been drunk as shit. There was a huge mess all over the inside of the baggie, like the yeast took a runny dump past the jar lid, and I know I overfilled the jar to begin with and didn't even screw the ring down enough. Fucking embarassing. As I'm unscrewing the ring, I'm seeing healthy looking slurry, but it's nearly black up near the lip of the jar. I'm spraying star-san all over the lip, trying to dislodge this dark yeast-sludge all the while hoping that I'm not pushing it inside the jar with the rest of the healthy yeast. I make a full rotation, and finally pull off the lid. Success! There are only a few small dots of darkyeast™ around the lip of the jar, so I decide to pour from the opposite end. Probrewer mode-engage. Well, this yeast floccs like a ton of bricks on the surface of Jupiter, so half of the slurry goes into the fermenter in thick sheets, and the other half remains cemented to the bottom and sides of the jar with the same strength that a pimp grips his paper, son.
With a full body-ache, a Racer 5 clone, and something else that makes 3 items in this list, I decide to rinse out the rest of the yeast from the jar, oxygenate, close up the fermenter, put on the blowoff tube, and lug the fermenter upstairs to my favorite fermentation chamber named Geoffrey and call it a night.
The end.
So thanks for bearing with my bitching session. Most of my brew days are awesome fun with great results, but this one was exceptionally shitty, and reminded me that...insert something philosophical here.
Thanks for listening. I'll be sure to report back next week with something much better, and less drunk.
- but with a hint of spice in the background. Kinda nutmeg or allspice, but very subtle.