Saturday, December 16, 2006

Phat Fired Weizenbock

I brewed a recipe out of Papazian's book tonight. 'Phat Fired Weizenbock'

I substituted the LME in his recipe for 7.5lb of DME. About 1.5lb at the beginning of the boil. 2oz spalt 3.5% boiling hops. 1oz of tettnanger 3.7% at 5min and another 1oz of the same at two minutes. Steeped 1lb Crystal and 1/4 of Carafe III and the same of British Chocolate.

I cooked my CFC in the oven for about 45min at 300º to make sure it's clean. I flushed it with Star San after that. Ran through the CFC twice to get the wort to about 70º. Closed up the fermenter and shook the crap out of it. Then I pitched the yeast starter and gave it a good stir.

I think I got through this batch with out any major problems or screw-ups. I did forget to take an O.G. reading though. I'm not worried about that, it should come out to about 1.065. The only potential problem was that while I was steeping the grains for about a min. the temp went up to about 180º. As soon as I saw it I took it off the heat and cooled it down. I don't think it was long enough that I'll have to worry about tannins.

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Friday, December 08, 2006

Keg pics

Well, I finished off the keg of Heffe Weissen and now I have about 1/2 keg of the Alt left.

I have a new batch ready to go into the keg this weekend. It's a bit of a mystery beer because I messed up the recipe. I was trying to something like a Guinness for the first time. The recipe called for flaked barley as well as roasted barley and black malt grains. When I bought the ingredients I forgot the roasted barley. I figured I'd just make it with out and see how it comes out. I found that when you use flaked barley you need to do a 'mini-mash' to convert the starches to sugars. I did this, but here is where the problem started.

I found out that when you do a mash, you need 'base-malts' in the mash to convert the starches to sugars. That was the roasted barley that I forgot to buy. So, long story short, I'm going to end up with some starches in the beer. I haven't been able to determine from asking on the brew boards what this will do to the final product. All I've been able to determine so far is that there 'may' be some 'off' flavors in the batch. I'll find out soon enough.

Here is a pic of the kegerator.