Badducky Beer Blog: BREWDAY: Golden Cloud Ale

Here is the recipe I put together for my very first all-grain brew, which - as expected - was not a perfect day, with some kinks in process, but a successful one that has produced something that looks like it will become a delicious beer.

2 gallon recipe, for a BIAB, small-batch brewer.

3.5 gallons of good water

2 pounds of Rahr Red Wheat

2 pounds of Rahr 2-Row

8 ounces of Badducky's Toasted Wheat and Barley Blend

4.63 ounces of Quaker Quick Oats (This is exactly 5% of the grain bill...)

0.2 ounces of Cluster Hops at 60 minutes for bittering

0.2 ounces of Styrian Celeja hops at 15 minutes for aroma/flavor

Danstar Munich Yeast

This will be my first BIAB, all-grain beer, and my first all-grain beer, at all, ever. I have done partial mashes with great success, and extracts with steeping grains, and even made some excellent meads. I've never gone all-grain, before. A big day. A banner day. Hooray for beer and for me.

There are steps in the process I don't have, yet, which are important steps, but for my first batch, I wanted to keep the process simple and skip anything that looked like it might add more work to the process, even if it meant producing a better product, just this once. To me, the goal was moving from crushed grain to a happy, fermenting primary with all the necessary steps one time, to see if I think there's things that will make it easier.

So, I didn't take a gravity reading. I have no tool for that, at this time. We moved a lot, recently, and the hydrometer is... I don't know where it is. Maybe I broke it. Hm.

Well, I took 3.5 gallons of water in my kettle, brought it to a boil first to cook off any craziness, and to time how long it took to move from cold to boil, for my future reference, on this new stove. (45 minutes, give or take five minutes.)

Once boiling, I flipped it off, and left it uncovered, with the thermometer in place, to wait until it fell down to just under 170 degrees. I was hoping for a mash of 154 degrees. I have no digital thermometer, and, again, I'm aiming for pretty close this time to see what happens.

Yay, dough in! I used a big voile bag from Northern Brewer to hold my grains, and stirred them in. The temperature was dead on as close to 154 you can get without a digital thermometer, so I closed the kettle and put it in an oven pre-heated to 170 degrees, which was immediately switched off.

If you can see beyond the reflection in the glass, you will see the real picture. A kettle in an oven is turning water and grains into sweet wort.

As I have no hydrometer, no ion paper, and no fancy doodads - plus, I was really uncertain about my first crush - I mashed for 90 minutes using a technique I picked up from partial mash brewing to know when I was done. I took a spoon and tasted the wort. When it tasted too watery, I put it back in. When it tasted like wort should, I pulled it out. 90 minutes. That's what I did. Sometimes, I turned on the oven again, to 170 degrees (the lowest setting on the range) and flipped it off to keep the temperature up.

I also put an extra pot on to boil, because I was uncertain about the volume of wort I was producing. I wanted two gallons of beer. New to the process, and to the stove, I had no true knowledge of the right amount of water for the BIAB method, with the sparge water included in the kettle.

I cannot say enough how great it must be to have some sort of hefty colander to haul the grains out of the kettle. This couple pounds of grain became quite very yes extremely heavy with hot water in it! I held it over the kettle to drain as best I could, switching hands and double-handing and switching hands again. Woof!

Sturdy Colander. I need one. Eventually. Doing things by hand is not supposed to be a point of suffering.

Back to a boil, and it took not long at all.

Cluster hops went in. We have now begun to make beer.

Anyway, with my 4-5 gallon kettle, and it less than half-full, I patted myself on the back for preparing extra water. But, I should not have. I had assumed from what I read that this should mitigate, if not remove the risk of boilovers entirely with such an amount of headroom. Not so, grasshopper. I hopped outside for a quick task of bleach-water-filling-in-the-sanitizer bucker...

I sat on the couch a moment to answer an e-mail, and soon I smelled the burnination. Oh, my...

Yeah, so anyone who tells you your risk of boilover is reduced with BIAB is selling you something. This boiled over in less than six minutes with a huge amount of headroom, after it appeared quite stably boiling along.

I made the best of it. I know we lost bittering, but it wasn't a highly bitter beer with IBUs around 12. I won't be upset if the first batch comes out unbalanced. First batches are all about learning. Learning that boilovers are just as common and normal and happening if you so much as look away from the kettle a moment!

Lovely mess I get to clean up, now. All over the new house's oven range, too. And the floor. and all the gunk all over the kettles, too.

The boil completed. The wort finished at only 1.5 gallons, thereabouts. Next time, I'll increase the amount of water in the beginning kettle to compensate. Also, I see why people produce those measuring sticks for their boil kettles, because if I had known I was running so short, I would have added more water at the beginning of the boil, not into the primary. I shall invest in a twenty-two inch PVC pipe, next, and measure out my gallon markers for my kettle of choice.

Wort cooled; yeast pitched. Wish me luck!

Want to help fuel my habit? Follow these links and pick up your own homebrew supplies from Amazon!

Or, if you would prefer a simple kit:

Hey, maybe you need a basic brewing rig, to start out with!

Next entry: Fermentation In My Station

Badducky Beer Blog

Monday, October 8, 2012

BREWDAY: Golden Cloud Ale

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