The Plan:
Brew a "Kansas City Pale Ale" kit from Bacchus and Barleycorn.
Brew a "Kansas City Pale Ale" kit from Bacchus and Barleycorn.
Unlike last time, this was a full boil. Brewing happened outdoors (hurray for sixty degree January days) on a propane turkey fryer. I think I need one. And a giant kettle with a valve and thermometer built in.
In the glass: Sierra Nevada "Ruthless Rye" and New Belgium's not-as-good-as-Dig spring seasonal "Spring Blonde".
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| Large kettle on a propane turkey fryer, water and an immersion chiller in the background. Frigid winter hose water cools the hot wort down super fast. |
The Problems:
I don't know if there were any problems on the brewing side, but cool color tone croquet team definitely had some issues.
I don't know if there were any problems on the brewing side, but cool color tone croquet team definitely had some issues.
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| Blue/Black/Green getting utterly crushed Red/Yellow/Orange. |
There was one issue that I was worried about going in, though. I just purchased a refractometer, so I got to measure brix, which is a proxy for specific gravity. It's more or less 1/4th of the specific gravity, but that relationship breaks down at higher specific gravities. My refractometer measured 15.2 percent brix, which matched up nicely with the 60 points that the hydrometer measured. The best part about that is that the refractometer only takes a couple of drops instead of the entire test jar for the hydrometer.
Hopefully not a problem: we saved the final hops (1/2 oz of East Kent Golding hops) and are going to add them when we go to secondary.
I guess we also need to keep track of temperature when we pitch. I've heard that makes a difference. I think this might have been 76 degrees.
| Temperature since pitching the yeast. I don't know if this will update automatically as I add more info to the plot. Note: it does. I clicked "Publish chart" - "Interactive chart" - copy/pasted the java script into the HTML of the page. |
The Results:
OG: 1.055 (target)
OG: 1.060 (actual)
FG: 1.016 (target)
Fermenting in a 6+ gallon ale pail with blowoff tube installed.
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| It's boiling furiously, but you can't hear it because it is simply a picture. I should have signed up for Vine. |
Plans for the future involve some small batches of all grain (refractometer will help with this), growing hops, making a counterflow wort chiller, figure out some sort of basic temperature control, etc.
