Team Sea Donkey

OK, this second batch brew day went much smoother, however it still had a few hiccups. I think it is a good thing that I am trying out these super small batches of beer, cause nobody likes to waste beer, right? This time I had a side pot of water with the barley going at just under a boil. When the wort boiled down too far I would use this water from this side pot to add. I don’t have a wort chiller, so I have to go ghetto and cool down my wort by keeping it in a sink with cold water before I pitch the yeast. I don’t know what I was thinking, but rather than cooling down the kettle I poured the wort into the growler, then as soon as I set it in the sink the glass cracked. Luckily it was only a hairline crack, so I didn’t lose the wort, I happened to have another growler, so it’s all good. Guarenteed the third mini batc will be better.

Josh picked up a B3 stout extract kit that we brewed about week and a half ago. Seems like this was the best brew day yet and I’m looking forward to kegging it this weekend. we got a good o.g. reading since I finally picked up a hydrometer beaker (worth the 3 bucks). I’ll post the gravity and alcohol content once keg it. Anyway, this has by far been the smoothest brew day yet. Good beer and good times will be flowing from Mark’s house next week when we have 2 home brews on tap.

I am sure you have heard of fermenting your beer, then breaking it down into 5 “small” batches. Well yesterday, I took this to a whole new level with the Mini Batch. I am really interested in brewing my own beer, however I live in the middle of the Pacific far away from the other Donkeys (except Da) and I cannot participate in the brewing festivities. I have a studio apartment that is quite small and is extremely limited in the way of storage. My great thought is that I will purchase the ingredients for the regular 5 gallon batch, but I will make it 5 times in small batches. I should have googled the fact that 64 fluid ounces is only a half gallon before I came up with this great idea. Well needless to say, I had to break my batch up one more time to have 10 micro batches.

I am brewing a Red Hook IPA clone. For the full 5 gallon process the recipe is as follows:

1. Grain: 1 lb. Crystal 40, 0.5 lb. Munich

2. Malt: 8 lbs. Pale Liquid Malt Extract

3. Hops: 2 oz. Northern Brewers (start of boil), 1 oz. Willamette and 1 oz. Cascade (30 minutes after start), 1 oz. Cascade (55 minutes after start), start cooling wort at 60 minutes.

4. Liquid Yeast: White Labs 001

I followed along quite well however about 40 minutes into the boil I noticed that the wort level in the kettle was quite low. I don’t know how good of an idea this is, but I added another 4 cups (1/4 gallon) of bottled water at this point. My reasoning was that I am going to have to add more water to fill up the fermenter, so why not do it at this point so it could have more of the hoppy flavoring. In hind site, I think that next time I should start with 12 cups (3/4 gallon) of water. Anyways, other than that I think the process went pretty smooth for this mini-batch. So, anyone want to share a 40 in a couple weeks :). Please let me know if you have any suggestions on how I could have improved this. For my first batch, I think it went relatively smooth. I had such a great time doing it and I look forward to make a lot more batches (and hopefully on a larger scale).

By the way, if anyone reads about this please do not mention it to my better half. She isn’t really into the beer thing, and thinks it is a waste of time, I cannot wait to prove her wrong, but in the mean time I have to keep it on the DL. I have stored most of my equipment and ingredients up high so she cannot see them, and I built a false wall to hide the fermenters :p Don’t worry about her reading this, it is at the bottom of a long block of text about beer, she will never make it to the bottom.