Me and my friend started with a cup of coffe saturday morning, and for the 115 th time reading the BIABacus spreadsheet that PistolPatch provided us with.
We weighed in the grains and fired up the electric urn. The mash temperature we wanted was 68 c, we heated the water to about 72 because the grains were a bit cooler than 20 (approximately 17), when we had stirred out the grains we took a temperature reading and found out that we were a bit high on the temp. We held about 70 degrees c. We checked the temp every 15 minutes and after 30 minutes the temperature had reached 68 and we did put a blanket around the urn to isolate it a bit more. The temperature didn’t drop any more during the (90 min) mash.
After the mashing stage we lifted the bag out and drained it over the wort whilst bringing it to a boil. We moved the bag to the fermentor bucket and added some more water, squeezed the bag a bit to get the remaining sugar out of the grains. When the wort started to boil we added it to the boiling wort. And added the hops.
The pre boil gravity was about 1.040 at 20c.
The boil wasn’t as heavy as expected but I think/hope that it was enough.
So, another cup of coffe and some time to entertain the 2-year old daughter at home. When the wort had boiled for about one hour we thought we´d connect the chiller to the faucet, we had bought a converter as we knew that it wouldn’t fit out of the box. When we had mounted it correctly we tested to run some water through it and discovered that it was a leak in the stainless steel tubing. The time were quickly running and we had to add the Irish moss at the same time as we tried to “McGyver” the Inversion chiller, we didn’t succeed doing that, so we had to manage without the chiller.
As this was our first brew, we have no idea what to do when things go wrong, all the reading and youtubing we´ve done was on perfect brewing, were nothing goes wrong. We had to wing it from here.
So, as we´ve heard the wort should be cooled as quickly as possible. We decided to move the hot wort to the (sanitized) fermentor bucket and put it outside in the snow (about -5 c outside), after about one hour the temperature had set to 55 c. Time was unfortunately running short so we had to abort the chilling process and leave the wort to chill overnight in a room that held about 17 degrees.
When I arrived back home after ~20 hours the wort was about 19 degrees and I raised the temperature in the room to reach pitching temp (21). This morning (after ~20 hours) the wort held 20,5 degrees and I couldn’t wait any longer, I took a gravity reading and shook the fermentor bucket and added the yeast. Left for work and now I can’t wait to get home to see if the fermenting process has started.
When took the OG-sample there was quite a bit of foaming on top, so I couldn´t read the scale, I used a folding rule to measure the foam and applied the difference to the hydrometer. It seems to have an OG of 1.058, expected OG was 1.054. There is 16 liters of wort in the bucket, just as expected.
So, how bad is this? Is there any chance that it will be drinkable or should we just pour it out and start over?
The beer that supposed to be a Kilkenny quickly became a Murphy´s (Murphy´s law)
Her beer was famous!
. Here's what I wrote before Joco...
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