Or something. Last night I brewed what was to be a 10 gallon batch of Robust Porter, I think I missed my mark.
I’ve been trying to get into the habit of brewing on weekday nights to help free up valuable weekend time. I still don’t have my routine down, but the concept is sound. So last nights goal was to be a high gravity (1.120 range) Robust Porter split into two carboys and diluted down to achieve two normal strength (1.060) five gallon batches of Robust Porter. I should have known from the beginning that it was going to be ‘one of those days’ when I was feeling a little out of place from the get-go.
I had never done a split batch like this before, and I have now decided that experiments like this should still be attempted but should be left for when you have extra time and feel fresh, not when your crunching your time and feel spent. Anyway, lots of little things added up to a rough night. Measuring and grinding my grains took way too long and is one of those steps that I want to start doing the night before if I am going to continue brewing on weekday nights. So, since the measuring took so long, which is while I heat my mash-in water, I overheated my water, so I had to let that cool. While that was cooling I knew the rain was getting ready to break and I brew outside. So I ran out with my new tarp and bungees I had bought to try and build a rain-fly for the brew area. The tarp was way too big and the bungees were a little too small. Fortunately I rigged it up so it kept most of the water off of me, actually it worked pretty well, it just made the area really muggy for the rest of the night.
Then it was time to mash-in, but I forgot to put my Bazooka manifold in my mash tun. Just as I was beginning to pour the grains in I realized it. Fortunately my mash tun and hot liquor tank (HLT) are built the same, so I grabbed and manifold and inserted it in the HLT, then dumped the water from the mash-tun to the HLT then mashed-in. Between the water and the grains the tun was very full, 13+ gallons in a 15 gallon tun. But between all the over-heating, cooling, switching between containers and adding the grains I totally undershot my target temperature and had no room left to adjust. I was aiming for 155-156 and I hit 149-150, yikes! Oh well, nothing I could comfortably do at this point but ride it out. So I began to heat my sparge water and mash-out water. I couldn’t even use the full amount of mash-out water that was called for. According to Pro-mash everything was going to line up, according to what happened Pro-mash lied or something else went a rye. Anyway, I mashed-out with what I could fit.
So as I was sparging I realized I wasn’t going to be able to collect as much wort as there was sugar in the bed, I could just feel it. I ran it slow and hoped for the best. After the sparge was over I ran out what was left in the tun into a bucket, almost four gallons at 1.038 at about 120F, ugh. Plus, while I was moving my kettle from the floor to the burner (no handles) I spilt hot wort down my arm and into the gloves I was wearing just I was having my dinner brought down to me. So not only did I mildly burn myself, I was embarrassed. Fortunately I wasn’t really hurt (except my pride) so I turned on the burner and ate some food which helped. In preparation for this batch to be split I planned on using a bunch of hops, six ounces of pellet hops, I’m not a big fan of using that much pellet hops especially in this high gravity of a brew. I also didn’t realize I had any Whirlfloc left and used Irish Moss instead, no big deal, but the Irish Moss is my back-up, I prefer the Whirlfloc. I need to organize my stuff.
So the boil went fine I suppose, cleaned a couple carboys and the mashing equipment while it was going on. I began to chill the wort and remembered that it was summer time; it was going to be a while. After an hour I was tired of waiting, the thermometer read 78F and I was tired and pissy and didn’t care, so I was done cooling. I began to transfer the wort to a carboy. My idea was I would transfer to one carboy, see what volume I collected, and check the gravity. If it was in the “proper range” I would then split the batch half-and-half and dilute with bottled water up to five gallons, retake a reading and go from there. The goal was 1.120, I hit 1.098 at 78F, so I knew it was really at least 1.100 if I adjust for the temperature. Of course the valve on the kettle clogged twice before completely clogging (did I mention I love using large quantities of pellet hops) and I had to do my favorite, the ol’ dump technique. So since I gathered six gallons via that technique, I figured with all the trouble I went through, I might as well split the batch and hope since I was putting a little bit more than 2.5 gallons in each carboy to start with that the new OG might be higher than 1.050. Lets just say this turned out to be messier than expected and I was starting to crack a little.
After all the transfers I took a little bit of a break from the wort and cleaned everything up. After clean-up I took a second reading of the new diluted wort, 1.048 – wha, wha, what!? I tasted the original sample next to the diluted sample, I shouldn’t have diluted it. I hate this beer. So I’ve been having problems with my O2 stone, it just hasn’t been bubbling properly. So even though I thought my tank was pretty full I bought a new tank to test because the tanks are cheaper than the stones. No difference. After sort-of oxygenating my wort I pitched the yeast, a third generation WLP001 yeast cake split between the two batches. By this point I had basically been “brewing” this batch of beer for almost seven hours and it was nearing midnight. I was wooped and wanted to go to bed and just forget about this beer. Hopefully it turns out drinkable since I have ten gallons of it. Originally it was supposed to be a Robust Porter. Now it looks more like a Brown Porter, but with Robust Porter attributes. So maybe a Robust Brown Porter, I dunno.
Oh, and I was sober the whole night, brewing without drinking beer is almost unheard of in the homebrew community 😉 .
