My brew day

Here's my brew day for a great Northwest IPA.  I'm brewing all grain, with a brew in a bag, no sparge, recirculating, gas fired system, built from a 15.5 gallon keg.

The keg has a dip tube with a screen over the end, plus a false bottom to keep the bag off the bottom and avoid scorching the grain. 

The pump draws from the bottom, past a tee fitting with a temperature probe, and returns the wort back to the top.

The grain bag is held in place, and the return hose is inside the bag.  Not sure if this makes a difference, but I like the idea of keeping the fluid moving through the grain bed.

I repurposed an old computer case to mount my temperature controller.  Here it's set to my water strike temperature of 152, and indicating 53 at the temperature probe.  The controller will turn on the gas when the temperature is below the set temperature, using the gas valve mounted on the base of the burner (see above). This controller is also used during fermentation, controlling a heat pad and a glycol pump to maintain the fermentation temperature at the desired temperature (68 for this beer).

I use a dipstick marked off in gallons to fill the keg with 7.8 gallons of water.  This accounts for water absorbed by the grain during mashing, and for water lost during the boil.

Weigh out the specialty grains.

Weigh out the base grain.

And crush the grain in the mill.

Once the water is up to strike temperature (run the pump and turn on the burner and the controller will take it there) add the grains to the strike water and mix it well.

Reset to the mash temperature, which in theory is where it will be after adding the cold grains to the hot water.  I'm finding the temperature doesn't drop much at all, contrary to the books.  I believe this is because the thermal mass of the keg and burner is much greater than the thermal mass of 13 pounds of grain.

I stir once in a while, and check the progress of the mash with my refractometer, but it really just an hour or more of waiting.  The refractometer is an easier way to check the gravity than drawing a sample, cooling it off, and using a hydrometer.  It works by using the change in the refractive index with the sugar concentration. It's marked in Brix instead of specific gravity, but I've got the converted values for both the pre-boil OG and the final OG.  In this case I was shooting for 12.6 Brix, or 1.051 OG pre-boil.

And my cross-check with the hydrometer matches up pretty well. Now on to mash out and the boil.

I hoist the mash bag out with a rope and pulley.  Today was the first trial of my ratcheting pulley, and boy is that an improvement!

I let the bag drain and squeeze as much out of the grain as I can, wearing  rubber gloves. This all gets boiled, so no worries about contamination from my crabbing gloves touching the beer.

I'm using a plate chiller, so my hops are in a mesh bag suspended in the keg with a hop spider.

I crank up the burner to 212 and start to time the boil with the first hop addition, once a good rolling boil gets going.

When I have about 10 minutes until flame out, I reconfigure my hoses to include the plate chiller in the loop.  With no water flowing, just hot wort, the chiller gets sterilized.  This IPA uses a bunch of hops, including a big addition after flame out.  I run the chiller water to bring the wort to about 180 and circulate over these hops for 15-20 minutes.  This adds some really great hop aroma, and this time I'm using the cascade hops I grew last summer.

After the hop stand/whirlpool, I run the water in the plate chiller and it comes down to about 90 in less than 10 minutes.  The last pass through the chiller goes into the carboy at 75, or thereabouts.

I hit my OG of 1.06, but lost a bit of volume to all those whole hops.  I try to get 6 gallons into the carboy, so with trub and yeast cake I can yield 5 gallons of beer.

I'm able to get all the wort except the small amount in the pitcher that's left behind in the keg.  It takes a bit of doing to drain it all out of the hoses, but this is good stuff, so I hate to lose any.

To give the yeast a good start, I aerate the wort with an air pump, filtered to keep things sanitary and using a sanitized metal airstone.

Here's the starter with the yeast settled out. 146 billion hungry yeastie beasties.

I pour off the excess and swirl the yeast into suspension before pitching.

Here's the heat pad to warm up the brew.

And the temperature probe insulated from ambient and pressed on the side of the carboy.

And to keep things cool, my glycol hoses.  These go to the freezer compartment of my beer fridge, where I have a container of glycol and a pump connected to the temperature controller.  The controller will run either the heater pad, the glycol pump, or neither if the temperature is within a degree of the target setting.

This all gets wrapped up in insulation and the magic begins!

Preparing a yeast starter from a culture

Step one to propagate yeast from a slant culture is to allow the slant to come to room temperature. Then make some wort to grow it in. 

Get out a couple of test tubes, foil to cover the containers, inoculation loop and a lighter. 

In a flask, measure out 58 grams of dry malt extract, for 500 ml of water.  This will make wort that it about 1.040.Carefully bring the wort to a boil to sterilize it. Allow it to cool. 

 Sterilize the test tubes and foil covers.

 Flame the inoculation loop, scrape some of the yeast off of the slant of growth media and put it in about 10 ml of the sterile wort. Put the test tubes somewhere around 75 F, and wait for signs of growth.

Once active growth is present (it will foam up when swirled) double the volume in steps, up to about a liter of active culture.  I put it on a stir plate once it's more than a test tube's volume to provide more oxygen for the yeast's growth.

 To verify the number of yeast cells present draw up 10 ml of the stirred culture and dilute up to 50 ml with water.

Put a drop on a hemocytometer. A hemocytometer is a special microscope slide with a counting chamber marked off in a grid. Each square is a known volume, so by counting the number of cells in a sampling of squares, accounting for the dilution and the total volume of the starter culture, the number of yeast cells can be calculated. In this case, my starter had 146 billion yeast cells.  The recommended pitching rate for a 5 gallon batch of 1.060 original gravity wort works out to 233 billion, so I'm a bit light on the yeast.   

Deck rigging

I finally got around to putting the deck rigging on. I had made the wooden pieces a few weeks ago, from cherry scraps I had in the shop. The beads came from the skinboat shop. I gave them several coats of polyurethane to keep them from weathering. 

I opted to put grab lines the length of the kayak, so if I end up swimming, I can hold onto the kayak and the wind doesn't take it. 

Covering the frame

The frame cover is sewn on with the seams on top.  A pocket is sewn at the bow and stern, with about 4" less material than the fabric would naturally drape on the frame. 

The skin is pulled tight and the frame popped into the pockets on the ends.

Cockpit coaming

The cockpit coaming is the only part not made of cedar.  A hoop of ash was bent around a form after soaking in hot water. After it dried, I took it home and drilled and sanded it. It's drilled to allow sewing the cover up to the cockpit.  The ends of the coaming are lashed together at the overlap joint.