by Rob | February 17th, 2009
This weekend I finished constructing my mash tun manifold in preparation for my all-grain brew. I’m fairly happy with it. To be honest though, I have a feeling a much simpler manifold would do just as good and would have been cheaper, and less time consuming to build. Yesterday Brian stopped by and we brewed an Amarillo ale, and an ESB extract kit. The Amarillo ale recipe came from the Basic Brewing introduction to all-grain DVD. From what I’ve read batch sparging isn’t quite as efficient as fly sparging, so I added a bit more grain than the recipe originally called for. The Amarillo hops were so awesome we decided we should dry hop the beer as well. Here’s what we ended up with:
- 10.5 lbs. 2-row
- 1.5 lb. 60L Crystal
- 1 oz. Amarillo hops (60 min. boil)
- 0.5 oz. Amarillo hops (15 min. boil)
- 05. oz Amarillo hops (5 min. boil)
- 2 oz Amarillo hops (dry hop)
Our mash temperature started around 154ºF and settled around 150ºF by the time we started the vorlauf and lautering process. We ended up with ~4 gallons with an original gravity of 1.060. We started with about 6 gallons prior to the boil. So we lost 2 gallons to evaporation! I didn’t expect quite that much to boil off. I think its partly due to all the time I’ve spent doing extract brews… The amount of water required is different. Most extract beers come with a fair amount of LME, so I’m sure that offsets a portion of the liquid lost to evaporation. In any case next time we’ll have to aim for a better wort volume.
So today I checked to see how the fermentation was doing, and sadly there was no activity. I made a yeast starter with packaged yeast and priming sugar. Dude, Brian you took my DME! Haha.. Anyway, I just pitched the starter after waiting about 32 hours from the time I pitched the first batch of yeast. So I’m thinking from here on out I am going to make a yeast starter for all of my beers. I would hate to have 4 hours of brewing wasted by stubborn yeast.
