Wow…

… I’m not quite sure where to start with the number of things that went wrong on my most recent brew day, so I’ll start with a Wheat beer update–it got bottled.

Bottling this one made me really appreciative of all the help I had last time.   I was trying to sanitize, drain and fill and Elena was operating the capper/corker.  I managed to get the pin in the bottling wand stuck in the open position and sprayed delicious beer all over the floor while I tried to fix it…  The beer made it into the bottles though and it was a good learning experience.  For instance we learned that Elena is amazing at corking the 750ml bottles.

Ok, let’s talk about last Sunday.  I set out to make a Dogfish Head 60 minute IPA clone.  This is the first brew I’ve made that didn’t come in a kit and I must say that I had a lot of fun going shopping for the ingredients individually.  We almost forgot the yeast, but thankfully I was paying attention during my check out and ran to grab some.  The guys at Maryland Homebrew were really helpful, and I’m sure I’ll be headed back there.

I set up like normal with our 12qt pot (exciting news on that front, more later) and invited my buddy Nick over to have some beers and brew some… er, beers. Things started well, the steeping grains went in, came out and we started to crank up the stove to get the water up to boil temp.  I don’t know why I compulsively measure the temperature of my water at this stage-it doesn’t really matter since I’m headed all the way up to 212… but I do.  At one point I left the thermometer hanging over the edge of the counter where it was exposed to the burner.  It didn’t like that too much and exploded. It smelled a lot like lighter fluid, but didn’t seem to be overly flammable.

I have a floating thermometer, but the pot I boil in is so shallow that it doesn’t have enough liquid to float on.  I pulled out Elena’s fancy digital thermometer and dropped the probe in the pot.  This worked well for a little bit, but suddenly the display read something like “273″ which our water was clearly not.  I pulled out the probe and immediately realized my mistake: the metal stick part of the thermometer was hollow and water/wort had seeped in and messed things up.  I was pretty distraught at this, but when I opened the drawer to find a new probe realized that I had been using the probe to the incorrect digital thermometer and I was safe.  No idea if it will work in the right base unit, but it doesn’t really matter since we don’t use that one anymore.

I stuck in the proper probe and dangled it over the edge of the pot so that the open end was safe.  We pressed on, reminding ourselves that this is exactly the reason you’re not supposed to brew without a beer in hand.  Things progressed normally through the rest of the night (or so I thought) until we were ready to add the yeast.  This is the first time I’ve used a White Labs vial and the instructions say to shake it before you add it to the chilled wort.  I got it mixed pretty well and then opened the tube and it started spilling everywhere.  I rushed it over to the carboy and started pouring and then it wasn’t in my hand anymore.  Nick was laughing hysterically and pointed out that it had fallen right into the beer.  I laughed it off and we got things cleaned up and situated for fermentation and called it a night.

The next morning I realized three things:

1. I forgot to take a starting gravity reading.

2. I hadn’t sanitized the yeast vial before it fell into the wort.

3. We had borked the hop schedule.

Luckily fermentation had already set in and seemed to be going fairly well.  I pulled a gravity sample and got ~1.067.  My target was 1.070.

In my “mildly” inebriated state I had incorrectly interpreted the recipe and added the Warrior hops over the first 35 minutes and the Simcoe/Amarillo over the final 25 minutes.  What should have happened is that the Warrior was added until minute 35, or 25 minutes into the boil, then the others be added over the final 35.  Probably not a big deal.  Especially when you consider that we progressively increased the gravity of the boil by adding LME as we lost water volume and could fit it in the pot without risking boilover.  The lower gravity at the start of the boil should increase the hop utilization/bitterness.  Unless, of course, I’ve got the bittering science backwards which is a total possibility.  3.3 lb of LME was added at 0min (boil start) 20 min and 40 minutes.

It’s all good though, because we’re already fermenting away.  I got paranoid about the carboy exploding and put my blow off tube set up on it.  Turned out this was a wise move as the krausen has been creeping up the neck of the carboy and yesterday I noticed foam in the tubing.   It also makes a terrific bubbling sound which creates a soothing atmosphere in our living room.