Did I mention I bought 165lbs (75KG) of unmilled grain? No? Well I did. For my birthday my brother got me a brewers grain mill, so I can start milling my own grain. The cost savings on the bulk grain is huge and now I can control the quality of my crush. It works great, fitting perfectly on top of one of my fermentation buckets. The grain back can be placed right underneath, collecting all the crushed grain while I mill it. It’s a hand crank, so it takes a bit of effort. This beer is also going to be a no-chill so I won’t have a gravity reading until tomorrow AM.

Taking the grain mill for a its first drive!

I brought back a 16oz jar of huckleberry honey from my road trip to Montana and decided to make a beer from it.

Huckleberry Honey Ale

Ingredients –

Grains
•    5.0 lbs Pale Malt 2-Row
•    1.0 lbs Pilsner
•    0.5lbs Honey @ Flameout
Hops
•    1.0oz of Williamette @ 60min
Misc
•    1 tsp Yeast Nutrient
•    1 package Nottingham Yeast, rehydrated in ½ cup warm water

Equipment -
•    6.5 gallon kettle (big kettle)
•    2.0 gallon kettle  (small kettle)
•    Plastic Fermenter
•    Grain Bag (10lbs)

Procedure –

Pre-Mash

0)    Mill grain, place in bag.
1)    Setup insulation for small brew kettle
2)    Pre-heat mash water in small brew kettle, 1.88 gallons (30 cups) to temperature of 164F
3)    Measure out sparge water, 4 gallons (64 cups, 15 litres) in large brew kettle
4)    Boil 2 litres of water in electric kettle (for mash to raise temperature if needed)
Mash
5)    Place grain, in bag, into the mash kettle at appropriate temperature (~163F)
6)    Stir vigorously, take temperature and adjust as needed (use boiling water to raise temp or cold water to lower). Temperature should be between 148F-152F.
7)    Allow to sit for 60 minutes at constant mash temp ( ~150F)
8)    Raise temperature to 170F for last 20 minutes for mash out
9)    Raise temperature of sparge water in large kettle to 170F
10)    Remove and drain grain. Pour wort into clean fermenter from small kettle and place grain back into the empty kettle
11)    Sparge by slowly pouring hot water over the grain, collecting the runnings into the fermenter. Rinse, lather and repeat until mash water is empty.
12)    Take gravity reading of wort and move into the large kettle

BOIL OVER BAD

Boil
13)    Bring wort to boil, add hops at appropriate times
14)    Boil for 60 minutes, stirring every 10 minutes, collecting and tossing boil foam
15)    At flame out add yeast nutrient, rehydrate yeast
16)    Cool overnight (no chill)
17)    Move to fermenter, take gravity reading
18)    Pitch yeast

I also took some of the spent grain and made the dog some treats. I used a very simple recipe; 3 cups of spent grain, 1 cup of flour, 1/2 cup of natural peanut butter, 2 eggs and 1/3 cup of water. Mixed all together and set in the oven at 250F for 2.5 hours.

Spent grain dog treats to help keep Oscar very fat.

It’s brew day! I have been planning another Molasses Porter for some time now. The last time I made this was way back in September 2009. From my previous tasting notes from the final bottle of the that batch I was not happy with the overall product. I found it too heavy in the molasses area. This time around I cut back on the molasses, double the batch size and pitched a much stronger yeast.

Here is the recipe -

• 7.5lbs Pilsner LME
• 0.5lbs Fancy Grade Molasses
• 0.5lbs Demerara Sugar
• 0.5lbs Chocolate Malt
• 0.5lbs Roasted Barley
• 2 oz Northern Brewer Hops @ 60 minutes (I wanted to use Chinook but they did not have any!)
• 1/2 tsp of Irish Moss @ 10 minutes
• 11g SafAle S-33 Dry Yeast (not rehydrated)

Steps -

1) Steep the grains at 75-80c for 30 minutes in 7L of water. Sparged the grains with 1L of 90c water.

2) Add the sugars/extracts to the pot and bring temperature up to a rolling boil (95c~100c). Add hops.

3) Monitor the temperature and boil for the next 60 minutes, stirring the wort every 3-5 minutes to keep the hops from sticking to the side of the pot. (Nothing beats babysitting a massive pot of boiling wort for an hour. Thank god for music).

4) At 10 minutes left add the irish moss to the wort.

5) Remove from heat, cooled with water directly added to the hot wort. Brought the volume up to 6 gallons, but was not able to achieve a low enough temperature for the yeast so I moved the wort into the freezer for 30 minutes to speed up the cooling.

6) Pitched the SafAle S-33 yeast and closed up the batch.

Original Gravity was 1.056. Hoping to achieve a 1.010 final gravity. The estimated cost of this batch is around 35 dollars and I should be able to get 35 pints out of it, so 1 dollar a pint.

The plan is to allow it 3 weeks in the primary, then move it to a secondary to separate the beer from the trub (hops and grain leftovers that settle to the bottle of the fermenter) and clean it up a bit. I will probably give it 2 more weeks in the secondary, move it into bottles and give it 7-10 days of conditioning.

Now its time to start thinking about next weeks brew…