Introduction
It is the day before Thanksgiving and Jeremy, Travis, Glen, and I decided to brew. We are doing our first 10 gallon batch and the recipe we’re making is our excellent Livonia IPA. The difference this time is that we are using bought hop pellets instead of the whole leaf homegrown hops from Jason’s. The idea is that we can compare between the grown hops and pellets to get a better understanding of how the differences play out in the final flavor of the beer. My personal prediction is that this batch will be significantly hoppier than the homegrown leaf hop batch. Specifically because I suspect that we over “cooked” the leaf hops after harvesting in the dehydrating stage, but again, this is just speculation on my part.
Observations/Notes
Mashing: When cleaning the mash tun we noticed some burnt wort. The strike temperature of the water from the HLT was 165°, but once we added the grains the final mash temperature was about 4° too low (148°) so we added some heat. The problem was that it must’ve been too much for too long, because we mashed a little hot and apparently burnt something.
Lessons for next time:
- Increase the strike temp of the water by 5° to 170°. This should get the final mash temperature to be right where we want it, and we won’t need to add any additional heat.
- Pump the water for mashing into the bottom of the kettle and start adding the grains as soon as we have enough water to float them.
- Start re-circulating the mash as soon as all the mash water has been added. This is intended to keep the temp consistent through-out the mash, and should help if we do need to add some heat.
Ending Thoughts
At the end of the day this looks like it will be a successful batch of homebrew. The original gravity after boil was 1.062, and our target was 1.063, so pretty good. Doing a 10 gallon batch is a little different, but not significantly so, you just have more volume. My only worry now is that we will become victims of our own success, currently all of our carboys and kegs are in use! Lucky for us, drinking is the best part 