Judginator
This weekend, I participated in a five-way brewing session with the Judge Club. We brewed a doppelbock for the February FOAM Cup, as an opening salvo to the rest of the club. We're here, and we're getting... smarter...
Roger re-tooled the same recipe for the doppelbock that won the Frederick Fair Best of Show this year, and we decided to pool resources and create a single 20 gallon batch of the recipe, split into five 4-gallon batches. Each of us would take some of the wort home, pitch our own yeast, and control our own fermentations, creating five different lagers from the same boil. Then we'd come together to compare and contrast (it is a beer judging club, after all), and also enter them into the February Cup and see how we do.
We ended up with two of the guys choosing the German Bock yeast from White Labs. Another chose to use the Bohemian Pilsner yeast from Wyeast. Another elected to try out the dry lager yeast packets which seem to have recently been perfected. And then there's me... who chose the Southern German Lager yeast from White Labs.
We got off to a great start... everyone on time, bright and early with the sun rising over Roger's homestead. The rooster was crowing, the frost was on the grass, and we started milling grain by 8:15. We portioned out two separate batches to be mashed and double-decocted in two different systems... Roger's home system, and Bill's Brewtus rig, which he loaded into his van and hauled over. The dough-ins went just fine. We stayed at a Gluten rest for twenty minutes before drawing our first decoctions. Each batch was drawn, and we started boiling the decoctions, stirring constantly. Having five guys there made it easy to switch off stirring duties. We were extra vigilant in our stirring to prevent scorching.
Which would quickly become ironic. When we mixed our decoctions back into the mashes, we found that Batch 2 was a little behind Batch 1, perhaps by about twenty minutes. However, this would be advantageous as we could sparge them one after another and start the boil... at least in a perfect world.
About fifteen minutes into saccharification rest, I detected an odor. I smelled something scorching. Thinking it might be a boil-over (if it was my rig... but these are much larger vessels), I called it to everyone's attention. We checked both batches, and a gruesome reality set in as we realized that, for some reason, the pump on the Brewtus mash tun was jamming up, causing a significant temperature gradient at the bottom of the tun. The batch had scorched in sacc rest! We killed the fire, and brought out a sample to cool and smell/taste. There was no escaping it. Scorch. This isn't a flavor you can mellow out or get rid of... it'll be there all the way, and there's nothing to be done about it. So, Batch 2 was a total loss.
After some brooding, we quickly pulled ourselves up by the bootstraps, unwilling to let half of the brew day go to waste. We yanked out the remainder of the bulk grains I had brought with me, and decided to start over with Batch 2... this time simply using a Pilsner heavy grain bill (we ran out of Munich), and no specialty grains. We did a single-infusion mash in the Brewtus, which we all decided is what it's really built for anyway. There would be no melanoidin production, no specialty grain additions... just pils and munich mashing and sparging. The beauty of the plan being that, with a constant recirculation in the mash tun, we achieved complete conversion in 35 minutes!
We sparged the new Batch 2 (at this point basically a gravity-wort), into the same pot as Batch 1, and got the fire going. All else seemed to go as planned, until we began chilling. We measured 21.5 gallons at the end of the boil, which would make our 20 gallon target with 1.5 gallons of dead space for hot break and loose hops that escaped the hops bag. However, by the fourth bucket, we realized that something was off... somewhere somehow, we lost some volume. By the end of it, Roger ended up with only 3.5 gallons. So, one last wrinkle in the day.
After the fact, I put my bucket into my prepared fermentation freezer set at 50. The yeast took a long time to get legs under it, and I'm not sure why. I used some boiled and frozen ice to help bring down the pitching temp (we had adjusted the gravity accordingly). Either it shocked the yeast I pitched, or it just wanted to reproduce some more. In any event, I didn't get airlock activity until approx. 36 hours after pitching. Also, my freezer has been kind of crazy... it's bouncing from 56 degrees to 45 degrees with a little bump of the rheostat. I'm trying to get it to settle around 53, but I'll err on the side of 56, as this particular yeast has a range from 50-55.
So, about two weeks of fermentation, a diacetyl rest at room temp for a couple days, then I'll start kicking the sucker down to lagering temps until February... and we'll see if I can't master keg-bottling by then!
Roger re-tooled the same recipe for the doppelbock that won the Frederick Fair Best of Show this year, and we decided to pool resources and create a single 20 gallon batch of the recipe, split into five 4-gallon batches. Each of us would take some of the wort home, pitch our own yeast, and control our own fermentations, creating five different lagers from the same boil. Then we'd come together to compare and contrast (it is a beer judging club, after all), and also enter them into the February Cup and see how we do.
We ended up with two of the guys choosing the German Bock yeast from White Labs. Another chose to use the Bohemian Pilsner yeast from Wyeast. Another elected to try out the dry lager yeast packets which seem to have recently been perfected. And then there's me... who chose the Southern German Lager yeast from White Labs.
We got off to a great start... everyone on time, bright and early with the sun rising over Roger's homestead. The rooster was crowing, the frost was on the grass, and we started milling grain by 8:15. We portioned out two separate batches to be mashed and double-decocted in two different systems... Roger's home system, and Bill's Brewtus rig, which he loaded into his van and hauled over. The dough-ins went just fine. We stayed at a Gluten rest for twenty minutes before drawing our first decoctions. Each batch was drawn, and we started boiling the decoctions, stirring constantly. Having five guys there made it easy to switch off stirring duties. We were extra vigilant in our stirring to prevent scorching.
Which would quickly become ironic. When we mixed our decoctions back into the mashes, we found that Batch 2 was a little behind Batch 1, perhaps by about twenty minutes. However, this would be advantageous as we could sparge them one after another and start the boil... at least in a perfect world.
About fifteen minutes into saccharification rest, I detected an odor. I smelled something scorching. Thinking it might be a boil-over (if it was my rig... but these are much larger vessels), I called it to everyone's attention. We checked both batches, and a gruesome reality set in as we realized that, for some reason, the pump on the Brewtus mash tun was jamming up, causing a significant temperature gradient at the bottom of the tun. The batch had scorched in sacc rest! We killed the fire, and brought out a sample to cool and smell/taste. There was no escaping it. Scorch. This isn't a flavor you can mellow out or get rid of... it'll be there all the way, and there's nothing to be done about it. So, Batch 2 was a total loss.
After some brooding, we quickly pulled ourselves up by the bootstraps, unwilling to let half of the brew day go to waste. We yanked out the remainder of the bulk grains I had brought with me, and decided to start over with Batch 2... this time simply using a Pilsner heavy grain bill (we ran out of Munich), and no specialty grains. We did a single-infusion mash in the Brewtus, which we all decided is what it's really built for anyway. There would be no melanoidin production, no specialty grain additions... just pils and munich mashing and sparging. The beauty of the plan being that, with a constant recirculation in the mash tun, we achieved complete conversion in 35 minutes!
We sparged the new Batch 2 (at this point basically a gravity-wort), into the same pot as Batch 1, and got the fire going. All else seemed to go as planned, until we began chilling. We measured 21.5 gallons at the end of the boil, which would make our 20 gallon target with 1.5 gallons of dead space for hot break and loose hops that escaped the hops bag. However, by the fourth bucket, we realized that something was off... somewhere somehow, we lost some volume. By the end of it, Roger ended up with only 3.5 gallons. So, one last wrinkle in the day.
After the fact, I put my bucket into my prepared fermentation freezer set at 50. The yeast took a long time to get legs under it, and I'm not sure why. I used some boiled and frozen ice to help bring down the pitching temp (we had adjusted the gravity accordingly). Either it shocked the yeast I pitched, or it just wanted to reproduce some more. In any event, I didn't get airlock activity until approx. 36 hours after pitching. Also, my freezer has been kind of crazy... it's bouncing from 56 degrees to 45 degrees with a little bump of the rheostat. I'm trying to get it to settle around 53, but I'll err on the side of 56, as this particular yeast has a range from 50-55.
So, about two weeks of fermentation, a diacetyl rest at room temp for a couple days, then I'll start kicking the sucker down to lagering temps until February... and we'll see if I can't master keg-bottling by then!