I'm planning to brew 10 gallons of Janet's Brown Ale with my new Hop Rocket on Saturday evening (recipe is below). I'll be doughing-in around 7 pm.
If you're interested in electric brewing, are looking for something to do, or just have an odd compulsion to shovel out mash tuns, feel free to stop by.
Lee
3518 Water Point Rd, SW
Cedar Rapids
Janet's Brown Ale 10-C American Brown Ale Author: Tasty McDole Date: 6/11/2011
Size: 11.0 gal Efficiency: 75.0% Attenuation: 75.0%
Ingredients: 18 lb 2-Row Brewers Malt 2.5 lb Pilsen Malt 2.0 lb Cara-Pils® Malt 2.0 lb Crystal 55 1.75 lb White Wheat Malt 10 oz Pale Chocolate Malt 8 oz Carafa® TYPE III 2.0 oz Northern Brewer (10%) - added during mash 1.5 oz Northern Brewer (10%) - added during boil, boiled 60 min 2.0 oz Northern Brewer (10%) - added during boil, boiled 15 min 3.0 oz Cascade (5.5%) - added during boil, boiled 10 min 3.0 oz Cascade (5.5%) - hop rocket 4.0 oz Centennial (10.0%) - added dry to primary fermenter 2.0 ea Whirlfloc Tablets (Irish moss) - added during boil, boiled 15 min 2 ea Servomyces - added during boil, boiled 15 min 3.0 ea Fermentis US-05 Safale US-05 5.0 ea Oxygen - added dry to primary fermenter
One more note -- if anyone is planning to swing by, please send me a PM so I have enough food and beer on hand.
I'm not sure when I'll be able to brew again, so if anyone wants to see the fully electric system in action, it might be your last chance before the fall.
The Hop Rocket is pretty slick, assuming you don't push it too hard with a pump. Then you and the floor end up covered in hot wort and hop sludge while you fix the problem. It worked much better once I fixed the clog and started running off at a slower rate.
My only serious complaint is that there wasn't a recommended GPM flow rate in the manual. As a result, I ran it too fast and caused the leaf hops to jam up at the top of the Hop Rocket after a couple of gallons passed through (sort of like a stuck sparge, but in reverse). I ping'd John Blichmann about this issue and he said they just released a new "high flow insert" to solve this problem. Since it is a complimentary upgrade for current owners, I dropped the small screen in the mail and should have it back in a few weeks.
The wort smelled amazing and tasted very hoppy going into the fermenter. Assuming nothing goes terribly wrong, I'll bring some along to the July meeting.
Janet's is an awesome beer. I've made it a couple times and tried the Tasty version. His is very balanced in the bittering. The first we made was too bitter. The second time we cut the 60m hops in half and put them in at 30m. It still wasn't as balanced as Tasty's. I'm not sure if his filtering pulled out some of the harshness or our water profile is harder then his.
Runamok Brewing
Jesus must have been a yeast. Who else could turn water into wine?
Whoa! I just checked the fermentors and they read 78F!
I pitched late Saturday night at 62F, set the heater to 66F and the fridge to 72F (pretty standard protocol for me). Over the first 24 hrs, the fermentors rose from 62F to 66F. This morning it had worked its way up to 68F, with ambient temps at 70F. When I checked it just now, ambient fridge temps were still at 70F, but the carboys had shot up 10 degrees to 78F.
I've never had a beer generate this much internal heat before. They typically only rise 4-6F from pitching temps. It will be interesting to see how this beer turns out, since I pitched cool and kept it cool throughout the lag phase, which seems to be the conventional wisdom for keeping down fermentation-induced-off-flavors.
