Batch 20 in the Tank

Today was both a construction day and brew day.

Construction

The development of the brewing rig continued with the installation of burners and the addition of a March pump.

The burners replaced the turkey fryers, which had been temporarily strapped to the rig using radiator hose clamps (highly ghetto, I know, see below). The new burners are neatly in place on a piece of unistrut, and worked like champs. We are controlling them with dial controls from a gas grill. This setup worked great, but we need to decide how to route the gas lines and permanently mount the controls to the rig. We will also eventually add pilot lights or piezo-electric sparkers to more easily light the burners.

We also tested the March pump that Jim bought. It worked great once we figured out how to prime it, which was a challenge. That lesson took about an hour and was pretty frustrating. But once we learned how to prime the pump for each use, it worked like a champ. We used it to add water to the mash; transfer wort to the boil kettle; and add sparge water. We have a few improvements to make, including adding quick disconnects, but it was definitely a step forward in our brewing process. I expect we will add a second pump in time to allow for fly sparging.

Brewing

Batch 20 is Northern Brewer's Tripel. The grain bill set a record for our operation: 26.5 pounds. It filled the mash cooler almost completely full. We had several issues getting the mash water pumped from the lauter tun to the mash tun, but once that was resolved everything went great. We used the March pump to recirculate the wort during mash and both sparges, which was very effective.

We ended up with ~14 gallons preboil and ~11.5 gallons in the fermenters. The chilling process went great, and in fact reduced the chill water dramatically just to keep the wort temperature from falling too low. We pitched directly onto the yeast cakes from Batch 18. Overall efficiency was 82 per cent, with OG of 1.074.