It’s been a hella long time since I last brewed, but not as long as my post history suggests. Way back at the end March of this year, I brewed MoreBeer!’s Pliny the Elder kit from their Brewmasters Series. This is supposed to be the recipe, but my effort was not entirely ([cough]at all[/cough]) successful. No fault of the Brewmaster or MoreBeer!, this was a brew-day disaster predicated on bad decisions made by someone whose name rhymes with Schmeff–that guy’s the worst!
Tomorrow, I’m making my second attempt at the Pliny recipe. I want to see that if Schmeff stays out of the way, will I get a decent Pliny clone?
Anyway, today, I set up the Anvil Foundry to run 240V (thanks again to Brian at Short Circuited Brewers), and I’m very happy with how quickly I got to boiling. I was recirculating during the heat up, and that seemed to stall it between 170ºF & 212ºF, so maybe I’ll wait until I’m already boiling before starting the pump tomorrow. I had the same issue with the pump not quite getting the water to crest the rim of the kettle again and decided that maybe it was time to clean it. Thanks to YouTube (sorry, no link), I discovered that it’s pretty easy to do. The pump was actually really clean, so hooray to me for keeping up the maintenance. The real reason it was struggling was because I… er, Schmeff… had the chiller above the pump again. As soon as we lowered it below the pump–it was only a couple of inches–there was no issue with the flow, even when we closed the valve down to next to nothing.
I used this opportunity to boil my plate chiller; it had a little mold in it–gross! I back-flushed it with the garden hose and got it all clear; now, it should be sanitized too. Pretty sure I’m going to sell it because it just seems too prone to clogging with my particular set up. We’ll see. I’m actually scaling back on a lot of my home homebrewing gear. I’m a five-gallon brewer; it’s what I’m good at and what I have room for. Maybe someday, I’ll see about scaling back up, but for now, I don’t need anything cluttering up the garage that’s for larger brewing efforts. Except my 15-gallon TallBoy kettle; I’m going to keep that.
The real main goal today was to prep my cider. I’m making the Dave’s Caramel Apple Cider recipe again. Prepping means transferring the five one-gallon jugs of Treetop apple juice from Costco into a carboy and adding 5oz of corn sugar and 1 Campden tablet per gallon. It’ll sit for 24 hours to let the Campden tabs do their precautionary work (it’s highly unlikely there’s any wild yeast at play, but better safe than sorry), and then I’ll oxygenate and pitch the yeast. It typically ferments for about 2 weeks. Here’s my brew-day checklist for cider.
Yeah, so the brew-day disaster back in March… We’ll this was the first batch that I was going to chill with the plate chiller. I was using the 9 gallon kettle on the propane burner. Schmeff decided not to use the hop basket for reasons (something about better hop utilization, I think); with a good whirlpool and everything at the end of the boil, it’d be fine, right? But of course the chiller got clogged within the first third of the transfer. Thankfully, I was using the trusty Brew Bucket, so I just drained the rest of the hot wort into it straight from the kettle. No exploding glass carboys, but the wort was still at about 145ºF, and the only way I had to chill it was by putting the Brew Bucket into the ice bath. Maybe I could’ve used an immersion chiller, but it wasn’t sanitized (nor was the counterflow chiller). At 114ºF, I’d used up all my ice, equalized temps in my counterflow water, so had to let things cool down naturally. This took a few hours.
It seemed to ferment normally, as far as I could tell. I dry-hopped when the Tilt told me I’d hit 1.010, and then I kegged and force-carbed a few days later. A few more days later it was ready to try; It did not taste like Pliny.
If you look at the recipe compared to the description on the Russian River Brewing website, the kit uses Magnum instead of Amarillo (I don’t know if this is an exact swap) and there’s no mention of whole Cascade hops in the mash. I think it probably had more to do with Schmeff’s brew session hiccups than the hop swap. It was drinkable though; I did’t dump any of it.
These are my notes/checklist for next session:
- Pliny the Elder clone all-grain brew kit from MoreBeer!
- drained first runnings from mash tun into a bucket while sparge water heated up; gravity 20.8/1.084
- left valve open on kettle when xferring wort from bucket; lost about a quart (poured onto my foot—no serious burns)
- liked using the bucket b/c I could measure my starting volume, as well as the volumes of the 1st and 2nd runnings; Philip would be worried about hot-side aeration
- not using hop spider this time [stupid idea when using plate chiller!]
- using Tilt in SS Brew Bucket
- plate chiller clogged while the wort was still about 145ºF; first, put the fermenter in the ice bath, then moved it to the kettle b/c it’s taller and added the ice water—chiling hella slow
- got started around 10AM and mostly finished clean-up at 5:30PM
- @5:30, still need to take gravity reading, oxygenate wort, clean/sanitize Tilt, and atttach blow-off hose; temp down to 116ºF
- except for the valve hiccup, the day went smoothly until the chiller incident.
- wort finally ready to pitch at 9:45PM (~82ºF); waiting for microwaved water to cool to rehydrate yeast.
- finally pitched yeast at about 10:30PM
- slow start, but as of 10AM, Tilt says gravity is down to 1.066 from 1.075 and blow-off sounds like a heartbeat
- lessons learned:
- use hop screen
- don’t use plate chiller
- pre-boil yeast rehydration water (not a super big deal)
- always always always check valves!
- dry hopped Friday, 4/16, at 1.010