Brew Day!

[Gameface]

A Saturday well spent. I made 10 gallons of my favorite beer, "Young's Extra Special (YES) ESB"


First Step, heat up 24qts of water to 165f. Add to mash tun (the 10 gal drink cooler).

Add my 20lbs of crushed grain. Stir it together vigorously. Check temp...152f, right on target! Let sit for 1hr.

Heat up 10 gal of sparge water.

Here you can see my built-in-the-house three tier system. Hot Liguor tank on the deck, mash tun on the table, boil
kettle on a 225,000btu turkey fryer. I can move all my liquid by gravity and I don't have to lift anything heavier than the
beer I'm drinking.

Sparging time. I didn't take pics of me vorlaufing, didn't want to risk getting a warning. Here I drain the wort from the
mash tun and add new hot water to rinse all the sugar from the grain.

Here are the first runnings, it's the liquid I collect from the mash before I've started sparging. This will get a little less dark
as I add the lower gravity* second and third runnings.
*(density of liquid, which is higher the more sugar it has in it)

Now I patiently wait to get my wort up to a boil. Not so patiently, really. I crank my kick *** burner way up and watch
the thermometer rise. In my back yard liquid boils at 209f, maybe I'm just lucky or maybe it has something to do with
the altitude. When it gets to a good boil I add my first addition of hops. Sorry, no pics of the hops.

Here we go! A nice raging boil. I've added my immersion chiller so it can get sterilized by the boiling wort. Later I'll hook
a hose up to one end and run cold water through the copper coil to get the wort down to pitching temps, around 70f.

So boiling is over and the wort has been cooled. Now I add the fourth tier to my brew system and transfer the cooled
wort to my fermenter.

Gravity is awesome! I use to lift and pour and carry large containers of hot liquid. It was a PITA! Then I got a second
burner and started using gravity to do all the work for me. Life is good.

 

[Gameface]

I transfer about 11 gallons of wort.

Now my fermenter is in my fermentation chamber, which is a 5cuft chest freezer with a secondary temp controller hooked
up so I can maintain greater than freezing temperatures with very good accuracy. I have an aquarium air pump going
through a sanitary filter then through a 2micron oxygen stone. This adds oxygen to the wort which helps the yeast
multiply rapidly so they can eat all the fermentable sugar in the wort without adding funky flavors.

Oxygen stone out, yeast pitched, blow off tube attached. I use to use a small airlock, but several times the krausen was
so big it got in the airlock and clogged it up. When I was using 6 gal buckets it would blow the lid off and make a huge mess.
Not sure how bad it would be in this vessel, the lid screws on and has an airtight O-ring. Anyway, all the CO2 escapes
through the large tube and goes into the growler which is filled with a small amount of sanitizer and water.

With this particular recipe I'll have good beer ready to drink in two weeks. Some recipes take longer, up to a month or more.
All I do now is wait, then transfer to kegs, then filter into some more kegs, then put in the keezer attached to 12psi of CO2
and three days later I'm drinking the best beer ever.

 

[Xsy]

Now that's a hobby.

 

[Gameface]

Now that's a hobby.

Well, living in Utah there are so many kinds of beer that I couldn't get no matter how much I was willing to pay, so I make what I want. The recipe above is for an Extra Special Bitter https://www.bjcp.org/2008styles/style08.php#1c of which the only example of this style I can get in Utah is the Anderson Valley Boont ESB, which I find to be detestable. Maybe it's the way it's sat in bright light and kept at room temps for months if not years at the state run liquor store, or maybe it just sucks. Bass is close to being an ESB, but they call it an English Pale Ale, fair enough. Bass is good, but I like what I make better.

In my opinion, if you live in Utah and Bud Light is not the be-all-end-all of beer for you then home brewing is probably a very good idea. I can make ANY kind of beer I want with ANY level of alcohol I want. I use to really bump up the alcohol levels on the beer I made, as sort of a "stick it to the man" sort of thing, but I've backed way off that because I've realized I can make really good tasting beer, and that's my top priority now.

Here's what I'm drinking now. A Kristallweizen. Try finding one of these in Utah.



It's similar to a Hefeweizen, but is filtered to remove the cloudy yeast https://www.germanbeerguide.co.uk/kristall.html, which also removes the yeasty flavor. It's as clear as a Bud Light and drinks just as easy as one, but has a lot more going for it, imho.

 

[NUMBERICA]

You are ****ing rad.

 

[kwb]

I think I'm in love.

 

[moevillini]

Ditto both of the above. Now we need to pair your home brew up with some of Log's dry aged steaks, and have cook-out!

 

[Gameface]

Ditto both of the above. Now we need to pair your home brew up with some of Log's dry aged steaks, and have cook-out!

Hell yeah, road trip! I'll meet him half-way, in Wendover, the city that occasionally doesn't sleep.

 

[LogGrad98]

Hell yeah, road trip! I'll meet him half-way, in Wendover, the city that occasionally doesn't sleep.

I'm up for it, but halfway is Carlin, not exactly a mecca of, well, anything.

 

[Gameface]

I'm up for it, but halfway is Carlin, not exactly a mecca of, well, anything.

Let's compromise and make it Elko.

 

[Stifle Tower]

Instead of Gameface, maybe you should change your name to #@$faced.

JK. Looks like you've found quite a hobby .

 

[LogGrad98]

Let's compromise and make it Elko.

Works for me.

 

[Ron Mexico]

So when is the Jazzfanz taste testing session taking place at your house again? That looks awesome!

 

[TroutBum]

Trust me, it looks a lot cooler/tastier than it really is. No offense to GF and his brewing skillz, but that slop he cooks tastes like a combination of liquified skunk stool and rotten zebra afterbirth.

Of course, it might be that I don't drink and pretty much anything that isn't Bud Light always tasted like pooh to me. That, and I'm a pussycat.

 

[Nate505]

I don't drink either, but I love the craftsmanship that goes into making a good beer. Kudos Gameface.

Maybe I can post a growing blog, though I'd probably suffer an infraction for it even though it's (mostly) legal for me.

 

[Gameface]

I had to go restock on brewing supplies and I remembered that I wanted to plug a new brew supply shop.

https://www.saltcitybrewsupply.com/beerBrewing.html

https://www.facebook.com/pages/Salt-City-Brew-Supply/205984949420575

Salt City Brew Supply has been open since June or so and they are the only brew supply store on the south end of the valley. The store is very nice and very clean. One of the owners is the guy I've always dealt with, except the one time he was out of town and the other owner was working. He's very helpful and knowledgeable and seems like an all around good guy. Sounds like he and the other guy have pretty much sunk everything into the place. I really hope it works out for them.

I've got nothing against The Beer Nut, except that they're pretty much downtown and when I work nights I have a hard time getting there before they close. I just want to support this new store and encourage anyone interested in brewing to give them a shot.

Oh yeah! They sell gourmet coffee and accessories, too.

 

[Gameface]

So when is the Jazzfanz taste testing session taking place at your house again? That looks awesome!

On Sep. 30th I'll be hosting a poker game and casual get together to support the Vote Ballou (aka troutbum) campaign.

The beer featured in this thread will be on tap. I will also have my kristallweizen and porter on tap.

Come by and give them a try! No need to play in the poker game to come meet some fellow Jazzfanz posters and the candidate himself. Stay for 5 min and bounce if you'd like or make yourself at home and have your fill of homebrew (with a DD, hopefully).

 

[prodigy]

not much of a drinker myself but this thread is impressive, but if i brewed beer it would be samuel jackson...mmmmm bitch!

 

[TroutBum]

Alright, I got to sample each of the brews at GF's place, and I feel obliged to give my review -- you know, since I'm such a beer snob.

Rockwell Porter: -- If you dragged a shot glass across the bottom of a Honey Bucket outhouse, poured it into a proctologist's outgoing bio-hazard waste, let it simmer on low heat for a month, and then chewed it down with a side of goat balls, your tongue and mouth would thank you for drinking that instead of this beer. It has a great name, but damn.

YES ESB: -- In case you're wondering what the ESB stands for, I'm pretty positive that it's, "Eating Sour Butt-hole". And just to make sure you're paying attention, they throw in a, "YES" as if to say, "Yes, you're Eating Sour Butt-hole". I am all for a good bung, but I'm not down with sour ones.

Kristallweizen -- Alright, now we're talking. This beer made me sad that I don't drink anymore. I will admit to having an extra taste, uh, just to make sure it wasn't poisonous. Solid beer with good flavor, clean look, and a smooth aftertaste. Hey, one out of three isn't bad GF, you animal.

 

[Gameface]

So, I've been super lazy about brewing for like the last 6 months and today was only my second brew day since December. Just like always though getting done with a brew day is a very satisfying experience.

I had to brew finally because I promised to supply the beer for my wife's side family reunion at the end of the month. But I also felt obligated to defend my title from last year https://jazzfanz.com/showthread.php?11825-It-s-Official-I-m-a-Badass&highlight=official+badass

I don't have any idea how I'll do. I took a pretty large departure from the recipe I've been using. I feel really good about it though and it directly addresses the comments of both judges gave on my entry last year. I went for the KISS approach and did a SMaSH brew for my ESB. SMaSH stands for "Single Malt and Single Hop." It's a brewing style gaining a lot of popularity. Basically it's a beer that uses only a single base grain malt with no specialty malts and a single hop variety, although the hops can be broken up and added at different times during the boil.

For an ESB I used the two ingredients that absolutely define the style, Marris Otter malt and East Kent Golding hops. Seems pretty fool proof. I also used quite a bit more hops than I normally do, which both judges emphasized I should do.

I looked up my judges. One is the lead distiller for High West, Brendan Coyle (not to be confused with the famous actor) and the other is a recognized beer judge, Riordan Connelly.

Anyway, wish me luck!