Beer brewing OC

Yeah, but I started out with @ 7 gallons since I used 2.5 gallons for the mash and rinsed the grains with 5 gallons. So it leaves me with @5 gallons which is the size I'm brewing. Sometimes I have to top it up with a quart or 2.

Funneled the cooled wurt through a sanitized funnel into a 6.5 gal carboy.

Added this liquid Belgian Wit yeast.

And we're off! This will ferment for 2 weeks. Wa-la!

Did you have some way to calculate how much boiled off, or are you just going by observation and experience? Or is this the type of thing I would be able to figure out if I weren't retarded?
What are the temperatures like in your place?
Gonna do anything special to control temperature?
And I don't totally get what's going on with your airlocking system there.

>how much boiled off

Pretty much experience, although I'm generally going by the info in 2 books, Papazian's and David Miller's. So, mash water is usually 2.5 - 3 gallons depending on grain weight because it will absorb some, and rinse (sparge) volume which is the same as the volume you're brewing. How much boils off depends on how hard you boil. I boil with a good roiling boil. I can leave it unattended and it won't boil over by using a couple drops of Fermcap, a silicone food grade product, that reduces surface tension so it won't foam over.

>fermentation temp

We keep the house in the summer @ 72F, which isn't ideal for an ale but I'm out of beer and need to brew. Ideally it would be 62F-68F for an ale like this. But last time I brewed this in June it came out really good so I'm hoping for the best.

>what are you doing with your airlock?

Sometimes even using a 6.5 gallon fermenter for a 5 gallon batch I get overflow. You can see in the pic where the Alt I brewed yesterday has overflowed through the blow off tube. I always set it up with a blowoff tube running into a jar with a 10% chlorine solution. After a few days I'll switch it to a standard airlock (pic related). That's from experience after having a standard lock overflow, lol.

Good questions.

can't you measure the density using a hydrometer?

>90 minute mash

I'm sure you're following a recipe that told you to do that, but even a 75 minute mash has been regarded as overkill, just fyi. 60 mash is the standard, but given that most commercial grains for homebrewers are modified (malted so that the greatest amount of starches can be yielded to convert into sugars), almost 95% of all starches are converted within the first 5 minutes. Longer mash times are an antiquated process because malts back in earlier years were not so well-modified, so you needed a longer mash time to yield the greatest amount of sugars. I'm all for following directions though, especially if it's a recipe you may intend to repeat.

Here's my setup. I brew outside due to spacial constraints. It kind sucks in the summertime because of bugs :(

>90 minute mash is obsolete

Ok, probably so. I had some running around to do that left me heating my sparge water an hour after I started the mash which put me at 1.5 hours when I began the sparge. No biggie.

Your setup looks similar in that you're mashing in a water cooler. How are you sparging? There's a lot of ways to do it, some more convenient than mine probably but the water has to be heated to 162F-168F. Are you using a store bought screen for the sparge strainer (lauter tun) or something rigged up? I drilled a bunch of holes in the bottom of a free 5 gallon bucket from walmart that I use as my lauter tun. Seems to do a good job.

Btw, nice garden squares. Fucking clean them out and plant something, you lazy fuck, lol.

>measuring density with hydrometer

Sure, but that's temperature dependent and only worthwhile to get the starting gravity once it's cooled. It really isn't a big deal to just go by the baseline of the quantities for mash and sparge and top up if necessary.

That's the real difference between a homebrewer and brewery - consistency. They have the equipment that can control the minute details to reproduce a winning recipe, once they find it, every time. Homebrewers have to be content with brewing good-very good beer and occasionally hitting a home run.

Haha, the garden squares have been tilled and are in full use right now lol. This picture was taken in the dead of winter.

I have a store-bought false bottom that fits the water cooler, though I've used a length of silicone tubing to affix the circumference of it for a more air-tight seal. I've used just about every method of sparging available. Most often I'll use the fly sparge method, though I've often ran into trouble with it as it doesn't work too well with a 5 gallon mash tun. It would work very well with a 10 gallon mash tun since the grain bed would sit lower in the vessel. With my last brew I said "fuck it" and did a batch sparge for the first time. After collecting the runnings from the mash, I added 4 gallons of water at 170 F to the grain bed, stirred vigorously, vorlaufed and drained the runnings. It resulted in noticeably less efficiency (usually had 1.047 OG from this recipe but had 1.036 from the batch sparge), but it also cut an hour off my brew time which I was pretty happy about.

I'd fly sparge if I was intent on getting the same gravity as the recipe lists. The last beer I brewed was one I'm pretty familiar with so I winged it and wasn't too keen on producing the numbers from the recipe that time. I was kinda tired of sitting out in 100 degree heat so I batch sparged to be done quicker.

Hydrometers are temperature dependent, but there are methods to figure out the correct gravity by inputting the gravity reading and the temperature of the sample. I've used it and found that if you take a reading off an incredibly hot sample, like one just off boil, it's only -.05 off from the same sample at room temperature, so I've always just done the math in my head.

That being said, I use a refractometer for any gravity readings on brew day and a hydrometer for any readings post-fermentation, as the presence of alcohol throws off refractometer readings.

>That's the real difference between a homebrewer and brewery - consistency.

I work in a brewery and have asked pro brewers about specifically this. Truth be told, the head brewer's demand for perfection has everything to do with the consistency from beer to beer. A brewer who is sloppy or disorganized or lacks attention to detail will produce beers that taste different, not good or bad, just different, from batch to batch. This implies that if a homebrewer hits a "home run", they can replicate that recipe as many times as they'd like on the same system, if they share the same traits as a successful pro-brewer.

My current batch is... a mild German-y Saison? Basically a mildly high test ale.
>German pale/lager malt with a touch of chocolate malt to bring it from pale to blonde,
>enough EKG to balance it out at the 30 and 55 min mark of a 60 min boil
>Australian Ale yeast so it wouldn't get too crazy at the high ambient temperatures.

All in all, pretty drinkable for what's essentially an improv'd Dampfbier.

My next batch is going to be more of a straight up Saison - again, high temperatures. I'm thinking a simple grain bill, probably a bit of wheat, some coriander, and a lot of Belgian yeast to hide the lack of refrigeration. Probably Galaxy, added late or even just dry hopped to give it a bit of a twist.

>batch sparge vs fly sparge

I've always done the fly sparge where I'm manually trickling the water over the grain bed with a measuring cup like I did today. I knew about the batch sparge but figured it would be reduced effeciency like you have confirmed. I have the time, so I don't mind doing the fly. A friend of mine does the fly by heating up his water to 168F, dumping it into a 30 gallon square cooler and let it trickle over a perforated plate at the top of the grain bed while he sits on his ass. He's a fatass, though and I don't mind standing and dipping the water. It's not like I'd be doing anything other than shitposting on Veeky Forums anyway.

How do you get the Saisson by using the Australian Ale yeast? I thought there was a different yeast for that.

Saison by method more than ingredients.

The yeasts used for modern Saisons (in my experience anyway) have a definite Belgian Clove/Phenol character about them. I wanted to play up the maltiness of the beer, so I used a yeast that would behave itself fairly well at higher temps, and found that people had had good results with White Labs' Aussie Ale.

I went and bought a kit for 130 dollars including a syrup mix. I followed the instructions and it's gone well so far. About 9 days in.

Pic related

this site does all the math for you, just put in the numbers of your batch.
brew365com/mash_sparge_water_calculator.php