Hop it ir, cool it down

The wort boils for one hour and at certain intervals we add hops. First at the very start with the 1oz of Centennial. then with 30 minutes left 2oz of Saaz. With 5 minutes left we add the remaining Saaz and we're good. At five minutes we add a teaspoon or tablespoon can't remember of irish moss to help with clarity - last batch we made forgot the moss and although it tasted great, wasn't something you'd like to look at.

Cydne was nice enough to make hop bags out of panty hose, and here she is showing off her skills

At five minutes we also put our wort chiller into the boil to sanitize. Sounds like a strange thing to do but brad read about it on the internet, so it works for me

After 60 minutes heat turned off. Then plug wort chiller into hose and waste way too much water just so we don't have to wait 2+ hours for our wort to get to room temperature. The wort chiller is fucking magic, and the person who invented it fucking genius.

Once cooled, pour into fermentation bucket, nice and clear so you can see nature working. Now we pitch the yeast, which both sexes agree smells like hell, seal the bucket, sit it in a closet. Clean up, have a beer, done.

HOLY SHIT IT WONT STOP BREAKING IT'S SO HOT BURNING MY LEGS

The best 6 or 7 minutes of our brewmaking experience is waiting for the so-called hot break. Very shortly after the boil starts to roll the proteins in the wort coagulate and start to foam up. This happens without warning and is chaos. If we had a seven or eight gallon brew pot this wouldn't be a deal at all. But our wort comes right to the top of the pot as it is, and add in a boiling hot foam that grows 5/6 inches without warning and you've got a good time. This batch broke seven times, 5 more than normal

Photo is breet freaking the fuck out completely, taking the pot off the heat source, all the while spilling scalding hot wort all over himself. Picture does no justice, next batch with yutube

FUCK GRAVITY

Your gravity tells you the alcohol percentage of your beer. You measure prior to the boil, perform some calculation, and hopefully you get close to the number your recipe specifies. How close you get to that number is a measure of your efficency - essentially how well you did extracting the sugars from your grains

Yeah but we fuck this up every time. Which is why we consistently purchase extra malt to throw in right before the boil. If we knew what we were doing this wouldn't be a required step, but we don't, so it is.


Our gravity was at 1.3, and the recipe called for 1.6. So we are way off. BUT we have no good way of measuring exact, i think the calculations are off somehow, plus i mean it always ends up fine, so i couldn't care less what some recipe author thinks my efficiency is. how about fuck you and your efficiency LOL

Photo above is us making up for our horribly inefficient sugar extracting skills by just pouring in however much extra malt we want whenever we want and however we want, lawya.

Then into the turkey fryer and on with the boil

Sparge

good words:
Beer
Wort
Sparge
Lauter
Mash

Still smelling good, and getting close to where we start the boil. NOW WE SPARGE.

Sparging is "getting the sugars out of the grains so the yeast can eat them later". One of the best parts of the process because it's the first time you get the liquid form.

So you have grains fully whetted sitting in your cooler and it's time to extract the liquid. We start by letting loose on the drain and getting about a quart of liquid into a container. Then pour same back into cooler. Did this three times until the liquid was "kind of clearer". Conversation something like:
You think this looks good?
Yeah maybe one more time?
OK let's do one more.

Then full on drain into the boiling pot until gone. At this point we have about 4 gallons or so but need more. So we take 3.5 gallons of boiling water and slowly pour into the mash tun, stirring. Then recirculate as before, have same conversation, and let it open again, resulting in 7 gallons of final wort.

Creating the Mash

There are thousands of people who know much more about mash and what's happening inside it than I do, and can write much better about it, but you're on my blog, so fuck you.

First we heat up 5 gallons of water in the turkey fryer to 165, and boil one gallon on the stove. Once the stove gallon is done we pour it into the cooler to preheat the tun, just so we don't strike with 5 gallons of near boiling water. Then empty tun back out.

Once the 5 gallons is at 165, we fill the cooler with all our dry grains and one gallon at a time start adding the 165 water, slowly stirring between additions. Target temperature after all the water is added 152. Can add more water if needed to get to right temp.

This shit smells GOOD AS ALL HEAVEN. Here's breet shoving his face in the goodness of the mash.

For some reason women are repulsed by mash smell, which means they don't know a thing about what smells good and what doesn't. That's Cydne up top letting us know what she thinks about hot water + grains.

Every 15 minutes we check this, just to stir lightly, to smell, and to make sure the temp doesnt get below 145, which it doesn't do, so don't even worry about it.

Brewday C HA B OY

Sanitize
Intentional skunk is good, unintentional is not. The key is figuring a way to get someone else on the sanitizing duties. We use a solution named BeerBrite and it eats up your hands, so that sucks.

The 27 Points (Belgian American Pale Ale)

Unless you want to be up until midnight making your beer, particularly if you're doing all grain like the real mother fuckers do it, and nobody gave you a wort chiller for christmas, buy your ingredients one day and brew another. We're lucky enough to have friends who buy wort chillers for christmas but still ain't tryin to be here until 10, it's new years eve holler.

And save your receipt after you buy ingredients. I threw mine away so here's what the book told us to get and we got everything as close to it as we could:
Malts
- 9.75 lbs. Pilsner Malt
- 1.5 lb Pale Crystal Malt
- 22oz British Dry Extra Light Malt (not in recipe but purchased in case readings are low)

Hops
- 2oz Liberty (4.5% AA) - got 1oz Centennial at 9% instead
- 3oz Saaz (3% AA)
AA stands for something to do with acidity, and there is a massive hop shortage right now, and the local brewstore will only let you purchase 4oz of hops at a time. So we had to make up for this, i like my fucking hop, so dood at brewstore said if it calls for 2oz of 4.5%, thats identical to 1oz of 9%. So we got that instead, 1oz of Centennial at 9%.

Yeast
- Belgian Ale - They didn't have this so instead we bought Fat Tire Ale Yeast.

Water
- 10 gallons deer park

Panty Hose
- 1 Pack

That's it.