FOOLCiRCLE

So yesterday Garrett and I got together to brew 20 gallons of an American Wheat Ale, watch out Cornhole here we come!

 

We had been tossing around the idea of doing another 20 gallon batch for a while now, and Garrett suggested a Wheat beer since Summer was on its way. I think Wheat beers have there time and place (Summer being that), but I know a bunch of girls that hang-out at my house that just love Wheat beers, so I couldn’t say no. The last time we brewed together hadn’t been since the ABA in the beginning of August, since then a few things have changed with Garrett’s set-up. Now he has three 26 gallon brew-kettles and a 15 gallon brew-kettle we get to play with plus two propane burners. His wife Donna also fashioned a super-custom super-pimp mash-tun koozie to help retain temperature in the all stainless set-up. It was an easier learning curve than last time to try out the new set-up, but still a first run all the same.

The day went relatively well all-in-all. We started later than Garrett probably would have liked, but my weekend was all mess-ed up with the Trail Dawg’s Half-Marathon thrown in there. Plus, on top of that, I was late getting to his house and I was half out of it all day. Our recipe called for over 50% wheat which is just begging for a stuck mash, which it did, solid as a rock. But we kind of pre-stopped the mash-out when we started to notice the symptoms and remixed the mash and recirculated, really only loosing maybe 15 minutes at the time and probably saving ourselves a bigger headache later on. The rest of the day really seemed like smooth sailing. I brought over a bottle of The Lost Abbey’s 10 Commandments which was a phenomenal Belgian-style beer, Robert and Karen stopped by, and Donna whipped up some serious sausage sandwiches. By the end of the brewday though, my long weekend had really caught up with me and I was spent.

With the yeast for this brew we used a 2nd generation yeast cake of WLP001 that I reserved from the Pacific Gem Pale Ale. This was a nice clean thick cake and it was just harvested the morning of the brew day.  Honestly I was expecting explosive fermentation by the morning. Instead, I was greeted to the sights of early fermentation signs; positive pressure in the airlock, hazy, light bubbles on top, but by after work time the fermenters were rockin’ and rollin’! It really was a good brew day and hopefully we can pull together another one some time soon.

This entry was posted on Monday, April 28th, 2008 at 10:46 pm and is filed under Homebrew. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.