Two Hearted Ale in the Pail!

Brew day started early in order to avoid the afternoon heat. I started heating the water at 0615 and was mashing by 0700. It was already 82 degrees in the garage. I moved my propane rig outdoors in order to keep the heat from building in the garage.

10 lbs 2-row; 1/2 lb Munich; 1/2 lb Crystal 20L; 1/2 lb Carapils

Heating water for the mash. I mash in the 5-gal coolers

I started with 10 gallons of water from the local market Culligan dispenser; I still need to get a water analysis from town before I’m comfortable brewing with tap water without any adjustments.

The first thing I noticed with my supplies was that there were no Centennial hops. Two Hearted ale is made with 100% Centennial hops! Due to the hop shortage, my supplier had substituted Amarillo hops for the Centennials. Being a forward thinking kind of guy, I had purchased several packages of Centennials some months ago and stored them in my freezer, anticipating their shortage. So I decided to do a mixture of Amarillo and Centennial, saving some of the remaining Centennials for another batch of brew later this year. I used the Centennial for bittering and aroma and used the Amarillo for flavor and dry hopping. It will be an interesting experiment.

These babies are like gold nowadays

Reheating the first runnings

Daddy's little helper

Boil in process

The sparge went quickly, too quickly actually. My final gravity came in about 20 points low and I noted a good deal of residual sweetness still in my spent grains. I should have held the sparge in the grain bed longer in order to rinse all of the sugars. Next time I’ll slow it with a clamp on the outlet of my sparge hose.

I used my counterflow heat exchanger in series with a copper coil immersed in an ice bath in order to get the wort from boiling to pitch temperature in one pass as quickly as possible. Tap water at summer temperatures won’t do the trick. It worked well; I measured the wort at 75 degrees and the waste water at 125 degrees. I collected the waste water and used it to water the plants.

$2.50 gets me 32 lbs of ice at Twice the Ice!

See if you can trace my cooling path (hint: the cornie is just to support the heat exchanger)

These copper coils were covered in ice when I started the cooling process

As stated, my final gravity was a bit light at 1.040. I added some Beano tablets to the secondary today in order to convert some of the residual complex sugars and get a bit more alcohol out of the beer. By the way, the Beano really works – you can watch the yeast come back to life after a day. I’ll leave the Splenda out this time, I used way too much last time and had to dump my beer:(

There’s 5 gallons in the secondary as I type. Preliminary tasting shows it to be a great, hoppy start to a great pale ale. I’ll let it condition for a couple of weeks, then rack half of it to my kegerator and half to bottles.

If you swirl your wort before you open the valve to drain it, the hops will mound in the center of the pot and not get mixed into your liquid

A perfect 5 gallon measure into the primary

My neighbor Brian, who chose to cut his grass with his new mower instead of helping me

A bubbling airlock the next morning signals a successful brew session!

Until I rack to the kegerator, Cheers!