This went well. I made a list of new things to be sure to do:
- Check water pH – 5.6-6.0
- Tun – line with bag then add water
- Add pH stabilizer
- Stir grain in slowly and carefully (note: crushed grain came from Brewmaster’s Warehouse all mixed evenly in one plastic bag. Very cool!)
- Iodine test at 30 and 60 min – it looked very good. A little hard to tell with the dark liquid, but conversion was definitely taking place. I also poured some off to taste it at the end of the sparge, and it was corn-syrup sweet.
- Sparge entire volume into a vessel other than the boil kettle – I used my primary fermenter.
- I ended up with about 8 gallons, so I used 7.5 gal or so in the boil. About 30 minutes in, I added another gallon to top up the brew pot. Gravity adjusted for temperature was 1.046.
- I kept a nice, calm, rolling boil throughout the 60 minutes. Hop additions all went smoothly. The BeerSmith timer worked wonderfully for this.
- Cool to 72F
- After emptying and sanitizing the primary fermenter, I poured the wort through a strainer, catching a pretty large amount of trub. I believe it also aerated well.
- Adjusted gravity at end of boil: 1.049
- 5.6 gallons in primary
- Fermentation chamber set to 68F
- Pitch yeast
Sweet Wort
The Boil
All was well with the brew day. When I checked for yeast activity later in the day…nothing. Hmmm… agitated the wort a little and checked in the morning. NOTHING! Oh, man what now?? When I got home from work I checked again and it was still dead flat. It sure seemed like the 2 bags of Wyeast had failed. Hard to imagine, especially since there was some swelling of the bags after smacking on Brew Day morning. Luckily, I had a spare packet of Fermentis 05, so I carefully sprinkled that in. By the time I came home Tuesday night, CDA2 was bubbling happily away. Smells great, too!
Stay tuned…
