Brew Roundup

Long time no post. So let's round up the last year or so of brewing activity. Brew details first, with the recipes posted below the cut.

This past year has seen a shift in my brewing pattern. I've got some recipes that I'm fine-tuning now. I'm also brewing a little less frequently, but with more ten-gallon batches in the mix. This has been helpful from a life-balance perspective, without sacrificing on the kegerator-pours-beer-when-I-pull-the-tap front.

Ten Gallon Hat Brown

This brown ale has seen some iteration from its previous incarnation. I recreated it with some tweaks in August 2014, and then tuned it further as the inaugural 2015 brew in March. The latest iteration dials back on the Fawcett amber and rounds out the malt profile with some Melanoidin (my new malty friend) and some Honey malt. I also went to Hallertauer hops, not for any specific reason but because of availability.

The end result is rich and complex, with a sweet chocolate-cake finish, but doesn't lose its drinkability. It may be the best beer I've ever brewed, and people seem to like it. It's a favourite of Erin's, and other friends have remarked positively about it.

The recipe included at the bottom is from the third edition. TGH will be back again this fall, I'm sure.

Smoke & Sting Porter

 

It's funny, I don't really remember this one so well anymore. But looking at Untappd, it seems like we all liked it. My tasting comments: "Really hit the target with this one. Smoke character is perfectly balanced. Get a nice roasted note too. Not too heavy either. Happy!"

The most memorable thing about this one is that on brew day, it got a little something extra in the pot: a wasp. I might have to brew this again, see what all the fuss was about. Maybe this time I'll add two wasps.

Campaign Rye Pale Ale

 

In what was a very busy fall, I took a leap of faith and brewed 10 gallons of a style I'd barely tried before. The result was epic. Campaign got us through the winter by being a fantastically well-balanced, drinkable, tasty beer.

Brewing it was a challenge, though. The mash profile was flawed, because it exceeded my mash tun's volume constraints, so I had to adjust on the fly. On top of that, the rye-heavy mash stuck during initial runoff, and I had to re-set it and sparge very slowly.

It also got a couple of random 2-ounce hop packages that I had hanging around. Ahtanum for aroma hops, and Glacier for dry hop. But the Glacier went in "hop tubes" that are designed to fit in a carboy, and that was a complete bust: the pellets expanded and turned into hop concrete. Very poor utilization.

Still, the end result was extremely good. My latest beer (below) is a RPA that is modeled on Campaign, though with enough ingredient substitutions that I'm giving it a different name.

Speaking of names: Campaign got its name by being brewed during the heat of the 2014 municipal election campaign. It was an incredibly busy stretch for me. And fortunately, the good guys won.

Santa's Sweet Stout

I set out with the mission of creating a "sweet" or milk stout, with cocoa nibs, to make it a "chocolate milk stout". If I recall correctly, half of this batch went to Andrew. I bottled my half.

This wasn't a bad beer, but it didn't really hit the mark. It was meant to be sweet and chocolatey, and it ended up being fairly dry without the cocoa nibs contributing much of notice. Which is a shame, because nibs are expensive. I had to hunt around to find some, eventually locating them at a baking goods store.

No Crystal IPA

This past April, it was definitely time to brew an IPA-- it has been too long! An experimental beer, this was a 5 gallon batch only, which I regret.

The name makes reference to the fact that no crystal malts were used. This came out of a conversation with Culum of Together We're Bitter, after I tasted his very delicious IPA. He has this thing against crystal, and formulated his IPA to not need any. At an IPA growler tasting event, his was light and drinkable, while everyone else's was some degree or another of chewy.

So I decided to give it a try. I followed Culum's lead by using some honey malt for balancing sweetness. I also used all Mosaic hops for the beer, which gave it a tropical juicy character.

Somehow I stumbled on a really nice balance. I got to recently try Block Three's Mo Money Mo Problems Mosaic-hopped IPA, which was good, but... I liked mine better.

I will likely try and replicate this beer. Maybe change up the hops a little.

Southern Exposure Cream Ale

This one was fun.

I wanted to brew an "authentic" cream ale. So I came up with a recipe with 3 pounds o' grits as part of the malt bill, as a corn adjunct. But you can't just toss grits in. You have to gelatinize them first.

So I basically boiled the grits along with some malt. The malt is needed to provide a little enzymatic action to break down the gooiest of the starches from the porridge-like mass of grits.

Given the approach, I decided to do a protein rest and some decoction mashing. It turned out to be quite a challenge, as I ended up having to do three decoctions after the adding the boiled grits to the mash.

The end result is just on tap today, and is pretty drinkable. It will probably improve after sitting in the keg fridge for a while. I would have liked to cold-condition it earlier, though. The best I managed was a few weeks of cool-basement-floor conditioning.

Dusty Roads Rye Pale Ale

Another crack at the RPA style, modeled after the Campaign RPA.

This was brewed today, with the lessons of the previous RPA in mind. Lautering was still a challenge, but nothing stuck this time.

The ingredients are different enough (I'm low on Vienna and had to do a bunch of hop substitutions) that I decided to rechristen this beer. Currently, our street is a big mess of construction, and I had to take the careful step of closing the garage door to prevent billowing dust from falling in the brew pot as I chilled it.

Speaking of chilling, that was pretty tough too! Our temporary water supply runs above ground for a few hundred feet in a nice blue plastic pipe. That meant the temperature was a fair bit higher than usual, which affects my ability to chill a wort using an immersion coil.

Still, no major problems. Should be a good beer in a few weeks!

FULL QUAD

A special brew day yesterday. I should have taken pictures. Yesterday we went FULL QUAD.

Dave and Shawn, a couple of friends, were on hand to assist through the day, which made it a lot easier. This 5 gallon batch of Belgian Quadrupel was a challenge, with some unusual and even unique steps.

Firstly, I used a liquid yeast in a starter I put on Wednesday, to give me the cell count needed to provide a healthy fermentation. I was able to effectively use Erin's stir plate (former research chemists have interesting toys) to get the most bang for my buck.

Secondly, this recipe called for a "magic elixir", a process step suggested by a respected brewing acquaintance. The first 1.5 gallons of runnings off the mash went into a separate pot, the demerara sugar was dissolved in, and it was boiled down by 50% or more to caramelize. Tricky, because it can't scorch or boil over, and the second burner I have is very hard to adjust. But Dave and Shawn handled that part of it well. By the time it was returned to the main pot, it was almost syrupy.

Apart from that, things were actually quite simple. A straightforward single infusion mash with batch sparge. A single hop addition.

A successful brew day. The technicals went well, and the company was welcome. But it'll be a while before we can enjoy the fruits of this labour. This is a beer for the winter, not a beer for now.

Recipe below.

Backyard I.P.EH?

WHOAH. HANG ON A MOMENT. WE CAN'T TALK ABOUT THE LATEST BREW DAY YET. WE HAVE TO CHECK OUT THIS AMAZING LABEL THAT ERIN DID UP FOR SPRING IS A TOUGH NUT.

I SAID IT SHOULD PROBABLY HAVE A SQUIRREL. SHE DID THE REST. LOOK UPON IT AND WEEP IN ITS BEAUTY AND I PROMISE I'LL KILL THE ALL CAPS FOR THE REST OF THE POST.

OH MY GOD

WE NOW RETURN YOU TO YOUR REGULARLY SCHEDULED BREW DAY BLOG POST ALREADY IN PROGRESS.

 

Karma? Kismet? Or simple good timing?

I was planning to brew a pale ale on Saturday. But then I learned about the Kitchener Waterloo Craft Beer Club's "Homebrew I.P.EH? Get Together" in mid-June: bring a growler of your finest IPA offering to share just a block or two away.

The twist is that the recipe has to include some ingredient from the local area. Theoretically that could include "water from the Grand River" according to them, but really, honest ground water pumped from a deep well to a KW tap, loaded with so much calcium that drinking it would bone-spur your teeth into a solid rocky mass, would be more "local" than some foreign liquid that just happened to tumble through Waterloo region by following the so-called path of least resistance.

In the brewery, resistance is futile when you have a pump.

I will not take that path of least resistance. Not when I have a pound and a half* of "Cascade backyard mix" sitting in the freezer. With six weeks to the event, the stars aligned, and I threw caution to the wind that filled my sails.

With a book value of 85 IBU (though I've had a history of low utilization from my backyard hops, so I don't trust that), and so much hop mass in the kettle that I had trouble stirring the brew during chilling, this should be a real hop-forward IPA. Even better, if I walk the growler down to Guelph St., then none of the hops in this beer will have ever been transported by vehicle. How local is that, hmm?

Pretty goddamn local, I'd say.

I admit: while formulating this recipe, I read this blog post that talked about how if you're doing an IPA, you just can't shy off the hops. It made me revisit it and increase the hop schedule. And then increase it again. 10 gallon batches sometimes have some scary numbers that come with doubling every ingredient, but 25 ounces of hops is pretty terrifying to someone who came into homebrewing during the great hop shortage of  '07-08, paying $3-5 per precious ounce.

Estimated wort loss from hop absorption: 3/4 of a case of beer(!)

As with the Spring is a Tough Nut, Backyard I.P.EH? is being fermented separately with different yeasts. English ale yeast S-04 in one (my experience with Tough Nut is that the S-04 version was fantastically better and the Bertus Brewery blog post above suggested it as an interesting IPA yeast option despite its seemingly incompatible heritage) and WLP-001 California yeast in the other.

Hang on a moment...

YOU REMEMBER SPRING IS A TOUGH NUT?

Ahem. Here, have a picture of some innocent squirrel-free fermenters:

Anyway, the WLP yeast is a liquid yeast, something I've never tried before, but the good folks at OBK have made liquid yeast a viable and economical choice now! The immensely wide range of liquid yeast varieties beckons: while there are 6-8 useful and accessible dry yeasts around, there are dozens to choose from in liquid form. They just don't keep as easily.

As of this writing, the WLP fermenter has kicked off nicely. The S-04 is still lagging, but that seems to be its lot. The fermentation temperature is still fairly low thanks to lingering cold ground chilling our basement... the fermenters are at about 62-64F, which slows the yeast activity down, but I do like the clean fermentation that results.

* So it turns out I didn't have a pound and a half of the Cascade. I ran out. I had to do some late substitution of 2012 harvest Zeus (last featured here) which is unfortunate because... it's best used as a bittering hop and has a distinct character. Even after 18 months in the freezer, it packs a powerful nose. The beer will be different because of it. But, you know, roll with it!

As always, recipe below.

Spring is a Tough Nut

Welcome to brewing season 2014!

With sunny weather and temperatures forecast to hit six whole degrees I knew it was time. We've had a long hard winter (and we still are having one, according to the inestimable Spring Indicator) but on this sunny Sunday, seeping tendrils of warmth would penetrate into Mount Breithaupt's deep, dark hibernation cocoon, and quicken the slow pulse of a sleeping dream.

In other words, let's brew something already!

MBB is still transitioning to 10 gallon batches, and today was my first solo 10 gallon brew day. So, there was very little routine about it. I also have a new pump, pretty much a necessity when it comes to moving up to hundred pounds of boiling hot liquid.

Old 8 gallon brew pot is now on mash water heating duty.

And that pump only sprayed me a little bit in the face with acid sanitizer when I was doing an ill-advised sanitation/diagnostic run. It's a tricky beast. The worst part of it is that it cannot run dry, so the pump must always be located below everything, so it can be gravity fed before starting up. Of course, that places an electrical appliance closest to a potentially wet floor and underneath all the vessels full of liquid. At least the power source is GFI.

10 gallon batches really push this Coleman cooler mash tun to the limit.

Still, I avoided real problems, and I now have some hard-learned SOPs that should ensure that I don't  face the risk of groping my way towards the garden hose to flush my burning eyes in the future. (Okay. Maybe not burning, but I'm pretty sure Star San solution stings pretty bad, and I got a hint of that today.)

After all that, what I had was a pretty routine brew day, with a lot of head scratching moments when it came to logistics. And I learned I can't really stretch almost-empty propane tanks, as the burner output makes boiling 12 gallons really a long wait if I'm not getting a strong flame.

Today's brew is an Amber Ale recipe adapted from Dirty Fawcett to fit with available ingredients. It's designed for simplicity, and for quick turnaround. After all, I have an empty keg fridge, and now is not the time to lay down a long-aging beer. Oh no. I want something quaffable by the time the deck is habitable.

And the beauty of it? A 10 gallon batch means I get two kegs for the price (well, the effort) of one. Check out these beautiful twins.

Different yeasts for each. Should make an interesting contrast!

Still underestimating my system's efficiency. Pegged 77% and ended up with about 85%. As a result, this beer will be closer to 6% than 5%. I'd consider watering it down, but I have precisely the volume I wanted, and any more means I'd have to bottle the excess.

Recipe below.

Brew Day: Ten Gallon Hat

Lots of pictures this time, thanks to assistant brewer Andrew's camera. (I'd call him "co-head brewer" but usually one or the other of us is in charge with a recipe. Yesterday, it was me.)

This means I get to realize how much I sometimes look like a hillbilly.

And it's great that we have some photographic evidence, because this brew was a trial run of a bigger 10-gallon batch size (hence the name!) with some new equipment thrown in. The brew day took a lot longer because of unfamiliarity and heating times on the larger volumes of liquid, but generally the surprises were pleasant ones.

Extracting wort from the mash into the kettle

The weather was unseasonably warm for November, with some glorious morning sunlight that turned to cloud but we still enjoyed 11-degree weather that made life a lot easier on everyone.

Bombe!

"I do not like this word 'bomb'. It is not a bomb. It is a device which is exploding." 

       - Jacques Le Blanc, French ambassador to New Zealand, 

on France's 1995 nuclear tests in the Pacific

Take your pick:

All bombs, or bombes. Some are more chocolate than others.

The reality is more like:

The rig above is a blow-off hose into a large plastic jar with water that serves as the airlock. While I've seen foam pushed through before, this blow-off rig has never been defeated. Until now.

In action:





And really, that's just the fermentation. I had a wonderful picture of the surprise boilover that occurred during brewing, but managed to lose it.

I'm glad I didn't name this beer beforehand! This was to be a self-indulgent brew day. An imperial stout is self-indulgent enough, but this one will see the addition of some booze-soaked cacao nibs and vanilla bean to make it a chocolatey. It already has the barley flakes to make it smooth and rich, and that's why it's so prone to explodiness-- it's almost viscous. And I think I've lost about 4 or 5 bottles' worth already to boilover and fermentation foaming.

Assuming it doesn't foam itself entirely out of the fermenter, this beer will get its cacao and vanilla additions in a few weeks, see some further aging, and be bottled in November. It will then get some nice shelf time, probably requiring until at least January before it's ready to be cracked open and enjoyed as a mid-winter treat.

Self-indulgent indeed, and self-named, too."Bombe" it is. Chocolatey and explodey.

The recipe below doesn't include the cacao or vanilla additions. Also, because of the boilover I mentioned, the hopping is... unknown. I don't know how much hops were lost when the pot turned into a mad, frothy god and whether replacement additions were less, more or about the same.

The Grumpy Urbanist

If a recipe is new, sometimes the name I give it when formulating it ends up being temporary. In this case, I had in mind something like "Dead Greek God", on account of the fact that I was using hops from the now deceased Zeus hop vine (it inhabited a large pot next to the driveway and unlike the ground-planted hops, was the victim of winter kill this year.)

The larger bowls are Zeus leaf, and the smaller bowls Palisade pellet.

But, I was feeling a bit grumpy and stressed out in the morning as I got the mash going, and depressed upon reading things like a bake sale with a drive-through. So anger-tweeting got me through the mash, and so too has it provided a new name for this beer.

Brew day went well, with a brief visit from our friends J and C. C has an interest in homebrewing and I routinely offer her an invite to see how an all-grain process goes. Oh, and J happens to be the namesake of the previous batch, which didn't get a brew-day post:

It's an "in" joke.

But back to the Grumpy Urbanist. For once, some accuracy in my numbers. Pre-boil gravity came out at 1.051 (vs a target of 1.050) with an Original Gravity of 1.060 (target 1.057). Much better than the terrible undershoots of the last few batches. Not that I've seen any meaningful efficiency improvements, mind. I've just dialed my expected efficiency down to a weepingly low 65%. Clearly, Chris needs a new mash tun.

This recipe is a little wacky. Brew with what ya gots. And I gots:

• The aforementioned Zeus hops - pungent, obnoxious, good for bittering
• "Palisade" pellet hops - similar to Willamette. Mixing pellet and leaf is a pain on my system, too.
• T-58 yeast - kind of a specialty yeast that produces some estery and peppery flavours
• 5lb of rye malt to go along with the last 5lb of pale, and a few more pounds of pilsner to round out the malt bill.

I figured that this beer could be a mess, in terms of flavour. Sometimes, though, you got to get a little freaky. But what I didn't expect was that this beer would quickly be a mess in the brewery, as well:

Airlock = insufficient.

Mad kreusen.

I've never seen a fermentation take off like this. These pictures are from ~20 hours into fermentation. I was already seeing strong gassing off at 6 hours! I should have known this might happen, since it's typically not until the next day that I see any activity.

So, cleanup on aisle three, change out the lid, and then back to the blow-off tube for the rest of fermentation.

Fortunately, at high kreusen like this, a fermenting beer is actually quite robust even in the event of a containment breach of the warp core. The overpressure means there's very little opportunity for outside air or microbes to get into the fermenter, let alone through the thick layer of CO2 foam. But I'm glad I caught it, because the sweet wort would also attract insects, and that would be that.

The recipe is below. I've also included the Golden Pockets, which turned out to be remarkably close to Dirty Fawcett that it's almost indistinguishable. It is slightly superior to it, though, so I'll regard it as a successful refinement of DF instead of a failed attempt to produce a different beer.

Brew day: Lawnmower Man Blonde

I like names that work on multiple angles. A "lawnmower beer" is something cold, fizzy, refreshing on a hot day after chores (like lawn-mowing) are done. It's not meant to be high-brow, just pleasantly drinkable. Then, as well, there is the fact that during this brew, I actually did mow the lawn. So I was a lawnmower man... or perhaps, a lawnmowing man.

And of course there is this:

SCIENCE MADE HIM A GOD.

The trifecta is achieved: Meaning, circumstance, pop culture reference. A name is born!

As for the brew, a few different things with this one. Instead of my traditional 50/50 split of super-hard tap water with super-soft RO water, this beer was put together with 100% RO with small mineral additions (1gr chalk, 1gr epsom salt, a tiny amount of table salt) to achieve a water profile similar to Pilsen, Czech republic. Of course, I have no idea if I actually hit those precise sub-gram measurements, or how mineral-free my RO supplier's water is, but I'm interested to see what effect this will have.

Also, I now have a kegging system, so this will go into keg once it's done. Hurrah kegerator!

I present: Lawnmower Man Blonde.

Brew Day: Wolfshark FACE 90XL

This beer is inspired by Dogfish Head 90, only.. awesomer. I present: WolfShark FACE 90XL!!!!

Actually, it didn't quite go entirely as planned. Gravity undershot, so it won't be as awesome as DFH (were that even possible to begin with.) But still, the name must live on, because I can't wait to see what Erin does with the label design.

The recipe is below. And yes, you read that right: hop additions every ten minutes, to get something like a continuous hopping over a 90 minute boil. All the hops went into a single bowl and I measured out about .4oz every ten minutes. To match predicted IBU I entered all the additions laboriously into BeerSmith. (Would it kill him to add a cut/paste function?)

The real DFH90 is Amarillo, Simcoe and Warrior. This beer is Amarillo, Galena and Northern Brewer. The malt bill is pretty comparable though, especially the Thomas Fawcett Amber (yes, that stuff again.)

Some stuff in the recipe notes about other difficulties I had today, including stuck sparge. It's a good bet that this won't be the clearest beer I've ever brewed.

Brew day: Dirty Fawcett amber ale

I should mention before I start: the Banquo's Pilsner is bottled, and hopefully will be ready to drink in a couple of weeks. Also, I'm sipping on the Garbage Pail ale (it had a much shorter turnaround) and it has turned into a very nice hoppy IPA.

I did have something different while brewing. Erin and I went through Niagara region yesterday, and stopped at Silversmith Brewing to pick up some of their fantastic Black Lager (it has become one of E's favourite beers-- apart from the fine products out of Mount Breithaupt, of course.) On a whim I also got a pair of growlers (at $5 deposit per.. ouch), one of which contained their Bavarian Breakfast Wheat.

So: Dirty Fawcett Amber Ale: a simple beer, Canadian 2-row with two full pounds of this Thomas Fawcett Amber malt that I recently acquired. Modest additions of Willamette hops and a clean-fermenting yeast. This will be a very malt-characteristic beer, and I need that. Need to learn what I'm dealing with since I've got SO MUCH OF THE DAMN STUFF. Likely I will give some away, because I don't expect to be able to stuff 2lb of it into every batch, and I have... 38lb more of the stuff.

Canadian 2-row and the dirty Fawcett.

Milling the malt with a Canadian Tire special.

Milled malt, prior to mash.

The same malt, spent after mash.

Recipe below the cut.

Brew Day: Garbage Pail Ale

"Garbage pail" ale: something to help me clean out some older ingredients.

I had a few pounds of Maris Otter (an English pale ale malt) and a lot of pellet hops that are getting to be almost two years old-- even sealed and frozen, they won't last forever. So I whipped up an IPA recipe, with the Maris O bolstered by some pilsner malt, and a lot of Amarillo hops.

Beersmith says this will be very high on the bitterness scale, but it's quite likely the degraded hops won't take it so far.

Brew day went pretty well, with no headaches apart from the weather. Unlike that wonderful January brew day, today was minus a handful, grey, and breezy. But the mash went great, so did the boil, and it only took one kettle's worth of boiling water to restore flowing water to the outside tap.

Recipe Link

In other news, the January Pilsner is still around, quietly conditioning in a corner of the basement, a spot that hovers around 55 F during the winter. I may end up bottling it at the same time as this one, in a couple of weeks.

Brew Day: A January Pilsner

A warm front has swept through southern Ontario this weekend, giving us a very brief dose of mild weather in the middle of January. It was about 5 degrees overnight, and climbed (in the sun!) to at least 11C in the afternoon.

With the prospect of such good weather, and an unusual free Saturday, I decided to have an impromptu brew day. Today's recipe: a German Pilsner that doesn't really have a name yet. (Perhaps I should call it "Banquo's Best" in honour of the play that is taking up so much of my time.)

I don't normally brew lagers-- at the homebrew level, they are more challenging, because they bring with them the need to have a cooler fermentation than most situations allow without chilling. But since it's winter, the basement can support a temperature of 55F/13C in certain corners.

Milling grains with muscle power is for chumps.

The recipe I put together is based around what I have: some german lager yeast (W-34/70) that was running up against its best-before date and I wanted to use, 8lb of Bohemian Pilsner malt and a bit of Munich, and some Saaz pellet hops that Andrew had bought for his previous brew (a Helles.) I've never made a beer with Saaz before, so I was looking forward to this. There are a number of similarities between this Pils and Andrew's Munich Helles, so I decided to try and see what a modest amount of flavour and aroma hops in this brew would do to distinguish it.

Saaz hop pellets, measured and ready for timed addition

Recipe Link

The brew day started out well enough. Here at MBB (in other words, my garage), Andrew and I had been refining and advancing our brewing process with a nice new Blichmann pot to serve as a mash tun, and even a couple of toys that we've not used (a March pump and a chiller plate) waiting in the wings for the next brew day to allow for some interesting new tricks.

But today, given I was on my own, it was a back-to-basics brew day. I would be doing a single infusion mash in the Coleman cooler I had started doing all-grain brewing in a couple of years ago, but that had been relegated mostly to hot liquor tank (i.e. storage vessel for hot water.) It's not a great solution for mashing, but it has got me through many brews successfully.

Coleman cooler, converted for mashing with dishwasher hose and plumbing parts

 

The "basic setup": an 8 gallon MoreBeer pot for heating and brewing, and the adapted cooler for mashing

The thermometer says I hit my mash temperature!

A beautiful, steaming bed of mashing malt

Drawing wort from the mash tun.

Using a refractometer to check the gravity of the first runnings

Still, today was odd. Despite hitting my mash temperature well, it chilled off substantially over the next hour that I felt the need to top up with boiling water to get the temperature up. Essentially I changed this brew from a single-infusion 150F mash to a step mash, finishing the mash out at 156F.
 
Other oddities: The wort was so heavy with trub (solid matter that isn't beer) that my pot's tap clogged up. I had to siphon out the cooled wort manually. A pain! Speaking of taps not working, my turkey fryer burner's regulator is shot and I was forced to control the level of flame at the propane tank tap itself. Another pain, and one that needs replacement.

Winter brewing means colder tap water: chilling after the boil is so much faster!

 Finally, despite leaving lots of volume behind as trub loss, the original gravity of the wort-- how much dissolved sugar it has before fermentation-- was higher than expected, so I topped up the wort with water. Watered it down, essentially, to bring the gravity on target and to restore the volume I wanted. The only reason I could do this was that I had underestimated the efficiency of the mash: I drew a higher percentage of sugars from the mash into the brewpot than my calculations had expected. So, combined with loss from the gunky clogging mess at the bottom of the pot, I came out right on target.

Dismantling reveals the culprit of my clogged pot tap: siphon full of green gunky trub

 
I don't usually fly by the seat of my pants so much! I prefer when the recipe matches reality. Variations become challenges if I ever want to reproduce something, so I took a lot of notes this time.

Despite all the oddities, it was a beautiful day to spend outside brewing. Normally, winter brewing is a miserable affair and something I've gone to lengths to avoid. But today was comfortable, with no challenges from freezing or snow, and the sun shone most of the day. I even got the chance to fix a downspout that had frozen up around Christmas time.

Naturally I enjoyed a beer while brewing!

 
The end result is a carboy full of wort, which will spend the rest of the winter fermenting and conditioning in the coolest corner of the basement. Hopefully this will be a lovely deck lager when spring starts turning into summer. 

Cold, dark corners full of beer.