Saturday Brewing

With a free weekend and nothing more I can do on the kegerator until more packages arrive next week I decided to bottle up the lager that I have in secondary fermentation and brew up an oatmeal stout.  I went with the bottling first to which end I sanitized everything in site, cleaned out the keg a couple of times and put in the beer.  As this was my first time using a keg I read later that I probably should of done some more extensive sanitizing including sending some of the solution through all the tubes and valves, but I plan on remedying that by cleaning all of that equipment on another keg before attaching to the one with the beer.  We will see how it works!

The oatmeal stout was next.  As I have said, I am not an incredibly experienced brewer, and have only used the ingredient kits up to this point.  This is the first one where I had to do a little more extensive mashing and actually steep the grains for about 45/50 minutes to convert some of the starches to sugars.  Because temperature was more important than other batches I made I took some wood shims and a small clamp and attached my thermometer to the side of the brew pot without it touching the sides.  This allowed me to keep a very good eye on the temp for the 45 minutes with an attempt to keep it between 160 and 162 F.   I think this went pretty well and I ended up with a very nice looking wort.  After that the steps are pretty straight forward and I added the malt, then hops, and with only one over boil got through the hour boil.  

Cooling the wort continues to be my biggest challenge as I do not own a wort cooler and it seems to take FOREVER to reduce a boiling liquid down to 70 F.  I think part of the problem is my brew pot being too think and really holding the heat in more than some other pots.  My attempt this time was to first cool the pot in a sink full of ice water, then put it down in the lager fridge so continue to cool.  This worked pretty well and after a while I was at the right temp so I moved the wort to the fermenter, added the yeast and threw the top on. 

On Tuesday I checked my progress and things are going okay.  I noticed that there were not many bubbles coming out of the air lock, and unfortunately the seal is not fully on.  I had to go to work, but plan on replacing the lid when I get home.  Hopefully the oxygen that will get into the beer during the switch will not harm the beer, but I think that a one time exposure will be better than continuous exposure through this seal gap.  Always an adventure!!

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“I fear the man who drinks water and so remembers this morning what the rest of us said last night” – Ancient Greek proverb