Well, it’s clear now that CDA1 had a catastrophic failure in the mash.  I had some good postmortem discussions with Zach W. and Angry Dave.  These are the points and adjustments to be made:

CDA1
1st batch I missed the gravity…ended up with 1.036 OG.  We think the mash was an abject failure for the base malt.  Maybe too hot for too long.  Maybe the boil scorched the specialty malt sugars.  In any event, this beer came out undrinkable.

CDA2
Adjust brewery efficiency down to 65% in Beersmith recipe.

2nd batch will use filtered water to a 10 gal cooler (from Home Depot) to hold the bag.  Also adding thermometer (from Williams Brewing) to the tun to make sure mash temp stays where it needs to be.  Will test mash water pH and amend with 52 pH Stabilizer if needed.

Need to improve my mash technique:
Bag, then water, then grain.  Add grain slower and stir/mix thrououghly when adding.
At end of projected mash time, perform iodine test and lengthen mash time if necessary.
Keep extra sparge water at proper temperature in boil kettle.
Batch sparge and transfer to secondary vessel.
At end of sparge, transfer to boil kettle.

Will also tweak end of boil:
After boil is cooled, drain through strainer into primary fermenter.  I’m hoping to keep more trub out of the fermenters.

I believe the best way to find out for sure what went so terribly wrong with CDA1 is to “get back on the horse that threw me” and brew this again.  This will then allow me to apply the changes to my procedures for future beer.

BJCP Guideines

Hail Cascadia!

We bottled this last night.  The taste was not what I expected…I’m not sure if I like it or not.  I dry-hopped per the recipe, but only for 2-3 days.  If I would have been thinking, I would have halved the amount, due to the poor efficiency of my mash.  So the hops were VERY forward, but not unpleasant.  The bitterness was strong, but not objectionable.  There was a bitter after-taste, though.  And smoke.  I have no idea where that taste comes from!  I didn’t use the Polyclar, because it was pretty darn clear.  I had the fermentation chamber in the low 60s for the secondary.

Oh, well…we’ll see what a couple of weeks and some carbonation does for it.

BeerXML

BJCP Guidelines:Specialty Beer

Dang…I missed the OG by a mile on this, my first all-grain brew session.  I don’t have a proper mash tun, but I’ve been doing my partial mashes with the grain in a bag in my bottling bucket.  So, I used the same method for this recipe, but put all the grain in.  I’m thinking I may have sparged (rinsed, really) too quickly.  I harvested a good 5 gallons of sweet wort, and it looked good:

but my gravity reading at end of boil showed 1.036.  I also topped up the batch volume to 7 gallons in the primary.  I was kind of hoping for a session beer, but I hope it isn’t hopelessly weak.  We’ll just have to wait and see…
All the hop additions went well, though.  Using Beersmith Lite on my android phone worked really well.  I separated all the boil additions onto individual plates, then just dumped them in when the alarm told me to.  Pretty slick!  All in all, a glorious brew day on Easter.