Now that I’ve punished my liver enough and freed up some bottles, I ordered up some ingredients and brewed my third batch of Drunken Monk and my first attempt at Bier de Garde. The former is my pet recipe I’m trying to hone while the latter is a farmhouse ale a bit like a saison but richer and darker. The first thing I had to do was go online and get the ingredients. As I’ve done a few German styles, I’m getting back to the Belgians for a bit so I decided to get a 55 lb sack o’ Dingemans Pale malt. They don’t ship well by UPS…just putting that out there. One thing I did learn: I though that a 55 lb sack ‘o grain would fit into a 5 gallon bucket so I also purchased another bucket with lid to keep my grain. A bit of some wishful thinking on my part. The sack will actually fit about 2 buckets but since my first two batches were heavy on the base malt, I ended up having just a full bucket after brewday. Having a full bucket of barley is never a bad thing, no?

Having recently picked up a new grain mill, a Barley Crusher ™, this was my first chance to try it out. Here’s what I’m using:IMG_0816IMG_0817

While I meant to pick some a feeler gauge to dial in the gap, I just haven’t had the chance to hit the hardware store so after some trial an error I settled on a 1/4 turn less than the default .04 spacing used by default. Everything seemed to go well when it just started grinding. When I first tried the thing out a couple of weeks ago, the same thing happened but I found that the handle wasn’t on tight enough so I readjusted and tightened the handle but it still just ground the roller and not the malt. Life lesson #1 on the roller mill: rocks and stones are not your friend. Come to find out there was a marble sized stone in my sack ‘o grain grinding the shit out of my roller. Nice. With that out of the way, I finished up the first batch and then I’m off to brewing.

Have you ever had one of those days? This was my day as far as brewing goes. I basically got fucked all day. And not in the good way. The first batch, my Bay Ridge Biere de Garde, was going well until I started to recirculate to prep for the sparge. I opened the spigot and nada came out. Ok, stuck sparge, I say to myself. I took necessary corrective measures like blowing into the valve, stirring up the mash, etc. Nothing. After feeling around with my spoon I realized that the connecting tube from my spigot to the false bottom fell out. Oh, shit. It wouldn’t be a huge deal if the mash wasn’t 175 F at th is point. Being the resourceful lad I am, I figured if I insulated and then waterproofed my hands/arms, I could just reach in and re-attach the false bottom and be good to go. Picture this: I’m wearing gloves, a sweatshirt and wrapped around my hands/arms are garbage bags…no, go ahead, picture it. Ridiculous to say the least with negative results. I resorted to dumping the mash out into my kettle and bucket so I could then re-attach the line, dump everything back in and continue with my sparge. That worked, but not before I had wort/mash all over the place. Just more to clean up.

After I finished up that batch I started on my Drunken Monk. Big beer, 23 lb grain bill that pushes my 10 gallon cooler to the limit. On the mash in, my Pyrex probe thermometer told me 188 F so I added about a gallon of cold water to cool it down. Mixed it up, and it still was at 185 F. Kept adding cold water but the temp didn’t seem to go down. I pulled the probe out and apparently the ambient temperature in my apartment is 195 F. Yeah…so at the time when temperature control is most vital, my thermometer kicks the bucket. It then went to read that the mash was 222 F. Awesome. I grabbed my other thermometer to find my mash was actually at 122 F now and almost to the top of my cooler. I had no choice but to convert my single infusion mash into a triple deccoction mash. I would get about 1.5 gallons at a time off the top, bring it to a boil on the stove and keep repeating until I was up to 154 F. Awesome. Needless to say, this little fucker got a screwdriver through the aorta:IMG_0821

My goal on these batches was to see how the use of the roller mill and the addition of the 52 pH stabilizer would help my efficiency. Both batches were in the 50% range but for obvious reasons, I can’t used either as a good judge. Onward and upward…