Oooooooooooooooh baby.
Tuesday, March 27th, 2007Sunday was a good day. I broke in my 28 gallon kettle with its false bottom, used fist-fulls of whole Amarillo hops, and brewed a ridiculous amount of Amarillo Pale Ale.
Unfortunately I found that my 28 gallon kettle requires different considerations than my 14 gallon - namely I originally ended up with only 17.5 gallons due to the additional deadspace below the valve, more significant boil-off rate due to cranking my burner to get a rolling boil, and the liquid the whole hops soaked up. I ended up adjusting to (20 gallons as you can see in the picture) by equalizing the volumes in each fermenter and adding about 1.25 gallons of water to each. 24 hours after brewing, oxidation will not be a problem - the yeast already scoured up any O2 I introduced. My gravity was also alot higher than intended (1.058 vs. 1.051), so the dilution actually puts me back where I was planning anyways.
So where does enough WLP051 California V yeast from a 20 gallon batch come from? No, not 4 vials. A 5 gallon starter, of course! For kicks, my wife and I polluted it with 2 pounds of frozen black raspberries (after harvesting the yeast and in the secondary, of course) and ended up with a decidedly unnatural colored beer, which will hopefully be very tasty. It sure smells good.
On the brewing horizon is:
- 5 or 10 gal belgian-style brew w/ WLP540 Abbey IV and Dark Candi Syrup
- 20 gallons of Saison du Sevier
- 20 gallons of Black Honey Ale
Obviously I’ll have to have a couple 5 gallon batches in there to get enough yeast for the Saison and Black Honey… I am sure I can think of something. I also ordered more Sorachi Ace and Pacific Gem hops from Freshops, and will be getting some WY3864 Canadian Belgian yeast to John Biggins so we can have it anytime we want…. I definitely want to brew more of my Travelers & Tourists Ale. Its amazing…. I’ll bring some to the next meeting.
