Brew Day!

[Gameface]

A Saturday well spent. I made 10 gallons of my favorite beer, "Young's Extra Special (YES) ESB"


First Step, heat up 24qts of water to 165f. Add to mash tun (the 10 gal drink cooler).

Add my 20lbs of crushed grain. Stir it together vigorously. Check temp...152f, right on target! Let sit for 1hr.

Heat up 10 gal of sparge water.

Here you can see my built-in-the-house three tier system. Hot Liguor tank on the deck, mash tun on the table, boil
kettle on a 225,000btu turkey fryer. I can move all my liquid by gravity and I don't have to lift anything heavier than the
beer I'm drinking.

Sparging time. I didn't take pics of me vorlaufing, didn't want to risk getting a warning. Here I drain the wort from the
mash tun and add new hot water to rinse all the sugar from the grain.

Here are the first runnings, it's the liquid I collect from the mash before I've started sparging. This will get a little less dark
as I add the lower gravity* second and third runnings.
*(density of liquid, which is higher the more sugar it has in it)

Now I patiently wait to get my wort up to a boil. Not so patiently, really. I crank my kick *** burner way up and watch
the thermometer rise. In my back yard liquid boils at 209f, maybe I'm just lucky or maybe it has something to do with
the altitude. When it gets to a good boil I add my first addition of hops. Sorry, no pics of the hops.

Here we go! A nice raging boil. I've added my immersion chiller so it can get sterilized by the boiling wort. Later I'll hook
a hose up to one end and run cold water through the copper coil to get the wort down to pitching temps, around 70f.

So boiling is over and the wort has been cooled. Now I add the fourth tier to my brew system and transfer the cooled
wort to my fermenter.

Gravity is awesome! I use to lift and pour and carry large containers of hot liquid. It was a PITA! Then I got a second
burner and started using gravity to do all the work for me. Life is good.

 

[Gameface]

I transfer about 11 gallons of wort.

Now my fermenter is in my fermentation chamber, which is a 5cuft chest freezer with a secondary temp controller hooked
up so I can maintain greater than freezing temperatures with very good accuracy. I have an aquarium air pump going
through a sanitary filter then through a 2micron oxygen stone. This adds oxygen to the wort which helps the yeast
multiply rapidly so they can eat all the fermentable sugar in the wort without adding funky flavors.

Oxygen stone out, yeast pitched, blow off tube attached. I use to use a small airlock, but several times the krausen was
so big it got in the airlock and clogged it up. When I was using 6 gal buckets it would blow the lid off and make a huge mess.
Not sure how bad it would be in this vessel, the lid screws on and has an airtight O-ring. Anyway, all the CO2 escapes
through the large tube and goes into the growler which is filled with a small amount of sanitizer and water.

With this particular recipe I'll have good beer ready to drink in two weeks. Some recipes take longer, up to a month or more.
All I do now is wait, then transfer to kegs, then filter into some more kegs, then put in the keezer attached to 12psi of CO2
and three days later I'm drinking the best beer ever.

 

[Xsy]

Now that's a hobby.

 

[Gameface]

Now that's a hobby.

Well, living in Utah there are so many kinds of beer that I couldn't get no matter how much I was willing to pay, so I make what I want. The recipe above is for an Extra Special Bitter https://www.bjcp.org/2008styles/style08.php#1c of which the only example of this style I can get in Utah is the Anderson Valley Boont ESB, which I find to be detestable. Maybe it's the way it's sat in bright light and kept at room temps for months if not years at the state run liquor store, or maybe it just sucks. Bass is close to being an ESB, but they call it an English Pale Ale, fair enough. Bass is good, but I like what I make better.

In my opinion, if you live in Utah and Bud Light is not the be-all-end-all of beer for you then home brewing is probably a very good idea. I can make ANY kind of beer I want with ANY level of alcohol I want. I use to really bump up the alcohol levels on the beer I made, as sort of a "stick it to the man" sort of thing, but I've backed way off that because I've realized I can make really good tasting beer, and that's my top priority now.

Here's what I'm drinking now. A Kristallweizen. Try finding one of these in Utah.



It's similar to a Hefeweizen, but is filtered to remove the cloudy yeast https://www.germanbeerguide.co.uk/kristall.html, which also removes the yeasty flavor. It's as clear as a Bud Light and drinks just as easy as one, but has a lot more going for it, imho.

 

[NUMBERICA]

You are ****ing rad.

 

[kwb]

I think I'm in love.

 

[moevillini]

Ditto both of the above. Now we need to pair your home brew up with some of Log's dry aged steaks, and have cook-out!

 

[Gameface]

Ditto both of the above. Now we need to pair your home brew up with some of Log's dry aged steaks, and have cook-out!

Hell yeah, road trip! I'll meet him half-way, in Wendover, the city that occasionally doesn't sleep.

 

[LogGrad98]

Hell yeah, road trip! I'll meet him half-way, in Wendover, the city that occasionally doesn't sleep.

I'm up for it, but halfway is Carlin, not exactly a mecca of, well, anything.

 

[Gameface]

I'm up for it, but halfway is Carlin, not exactly a mecca of, well, anything.

Let's compromise and make it Elko.

 

[Stifle Tower]

Instead of Gameface, maybe you should change your name to #@$faced.

JK. Looks like you've found quite a hobby .

 

[LogGrad98]

Let's compromise and make it Elko.

Works for me.