A beer log from start to finish...

6-18-08 pre brewing day...made a starter from stored yeast (Wyeast 1272, american ale II), was stored in the bottle for over a year in the fridge

6-20-08 Friday after dinner, filling up water from the RO unit for brewing, will add a little calcium and magnesium salts to the very soft water

Heating up the strike water for mashing

Making up a recipe (while the water is heating up) on my new brewing software (lost all my old recipes when my old PC crashed)

Reunion Amber ale

10-B American Amber Ale

Size: 5.6 gal

Efficiency: 75.0%

Attenuation: 71.2%

Original Gravity: 1.052 (1.045 - 1.060)

Terminal Gravity: 1.014 (1.010 - 1.015)

Color: 11.5 (10.0 - 17.0)

Alcohol: 4.94% (4.5% - 6.0%)

Bitterness: 33.18 (25.0 - 40.0)

(Style guidelines in parenthesis)

Ingredients:

9 lbs Pilsner Malt

1.5 lbs German CaraMunich I

1.0 lbs Belgian Cara-Pils

1.0 oz Hallertau Mittelfruh (4.5%) - added first wort, boiled 1.5 hrs

1.0 oz Cascade (5.5%) - added first wort, boiled 1.5 hrs

7.0 g Summit (16.7%) - added during boil, boiled 1 hrs

1.0 tbsp Brewbrite - added during boil, boiled 10 min

0.28 oz Cascade (5.5%) - added dry to secondary fermenter

Schedule:

00:14:23 Mash In - Liquor: 5.0 gal; Strike: 160.8 °F; Target: 152.2 °F

09:44:23 Saccharification Rest - Rest: 9.5 hrs; Final: 138.9 °F

Next morning

10:29:23 Runoff, 2.46 gal collected, 45.0 min; Total Runoff: 2.5 gal

10:39:23 Batch sparge - Water: 3.96 gal; Temperature: 189.3 °F; Target: 170 °F

10:39:23 Runoff @ 168.0 °F, 3.9 gal collected, 0.0 min; Total Runoff: 4.0 gal

Now that I have a recipe, weighing and grinding the barley malt into my mashtun (cooler with braided screen filter)...info on batch sparging and converted cooler mashtun here

Adding the hot (~162F) strike water (doughing in)

Mixing the thick mash well to even out the temperature... Dropped to ~154F, close enough to the targeted 152.2F

Next morning (Sat 6-21-08). Overnight mashing has liberated my brewing day...what would normally take 8+ hours to do in one day, I split up into ~3 hours in the evening, and ~5 hours the next morning...makes it much more relaxing and fun.

After draining the cooler and sparging once (batch sparging) both runoffs are collected in the brew kettle and will be boiled for ~90 minutes

The spent grain will go in my compost pile after it cools down a bit.

After the boil is finished, the beer is cooled using my double immersion chiller: tap water into coiled copper tubing in ice bath (bucket), then through coiled tubing immersed in the hot wort in the brew kettle, and back to the sink drain.

Chilled starter yeast culture...decanted most of the beer on top and add the remaining thick yeast slurry to inoculate the beer

9:00 AM: Wort (pre fermented beer) in the primary fermenter. The cold break (proteins and some hop residue) is on the bottom. The beer looks much darker in the wide fermenter than it will in a smaller glass, due to Beers law (Absorbance = ebc), e and c are constants, so the path length, b, is why it appears darker. The Original gravity (OG) was 1.050, the predicted gravity from the software was 1.052, so not too far off, mainly due to less boil-off than predicted...which means I got more beer too (~6.4gal). About half a gallon will be lost when transferring because of the solid trub and growing yeast cake, so I’ll still have ~6 gal. I placed the fermenter in the basement, where the temperature is ideal for this kind of beer (yeast), ~66 F.

9:00 PM: Beer looks lighter now as the yeast is propagating and being put into solution, with a light foam head on top from the beginning of carbon dioxide emission...the lightness is not because of Beers law, but because the light is scattered by the yeast particles resulting in an opaque solution. It is good to see this amount activity ~12 hours after pitching, which is a benefit of using a strong starter culture.

6-22-07 5:30AM: Activity is very high. The CO2 is carrying the break/hop particles to the top of the foamy head. I have the foil cap on loosely instead of an airlock, since the larger than normal batch might overflow.

3:00PM: Thar she blows! No biggie, it will mostly get rid of the trub/hop solids, with a very small amount of beer loss.

6-24-08   Fermentation slowing down, so I put an airlock on top.

7-5-08 transfered to keg (5gal) with dryhops, SG 1.013. Bottled excess beer in 7 bottles (2- 22oz and 5- 16 oz) w/ corn sugar for priming.

There are many ways to proceed. If I was planning on bottling the whole batch, I would have transfered the beer into a 5 gallon secondary fermenter with the dryhops to finish/condition for a few weeks before bottling, and add priming sugar before bottling. Since I have 5 gallon soda kegs, for this type of beer, normally I would transfer to the keg with dryhops and priming sugar, to condition and get natural carbonation over a few weeks in the keg.

However, since the beer needs to be ready for the reunion (7-19-08), I fully fermented out the beer for ~2 weeks in the primary, kegged it with the dryhops, and will chill it and force carbonate it under pressure, which will give me carbonated beer in a few days, and plenty of time to condition before bottling it for the reunion in 2 weeks.

The recipe is slightly lighter in body and hoppyness than I would usually brew for a amber ale, since the main purpose is to be consumed at an outdoor picnic in Hudson, WI...I am assuming hot and humid for July 19th. It is still not a light beer, for reference, Sam Adams Lager has an OG of 1.048 and FG of 1.009....

Now that I know the actual OG and FG, plugging the values into the software gives the final analysis:

Reunion Amber ale

Size: 6.3 gal

Efficiency: 81.57%

Attenuation: 74.0%

Calories: 166.44 per 12.0 fl oz

Original Gravity: 1.050 (1.045 - 1.060)

Terminal Gravity: 1.013 (1.010 - 1.015)

Color: 11.5 (10.0 - 17.0)

Alcohol: 4.85% (4.5% - 6.0%)

Bitterness: 29.49 (25.0 - 40.0)

7-17-08

Bottled the beer and packing for the flight: