Wotta's HomeBrew Blog: Brewing With David!

Hello Everyone!

Well look at that...! It's my birthday! LOL!

I went over to David's and Stacey's place yesterday to give him a hand brewing and to enjoy his award winning BBQ chicken n' ribs n' beef brisket! Boy was that BBQ good! Yummmmm!

I arrived there around 11:30 and he was inside measuring out the grain bill. I volunteered to get the water dumped into the HLT and to start heating it up. While it was heating, we crushed the grains using his Barley Crusher and we were ready to dough in the grains. After the strike water reached 170 degF we transfered the allotted 4 1/4 gallons to the mash tun and proceeded to dough in. The temp came in a little warm, so we had to add about 1/2 gallon of cool water to lower the temp to our mash temp of 154 degF. It worked out well. We hit the target temperature then wrapped the tun with a blanket for insulation purposes and set the timer for 60 minutes.

It's BBQ time! David and Stacey announced that the BBQ was ready and we followed him into the house, grabbed our plates and served ourselves to the spread! It was fantastic.

After the hour was up, the timer went off and David, Jeremy and I tested the wort for conversion by performing an iodine test. It was converted to our satisfaction! We then re-heated to sparge water back to 180 degF and started to recirculate the wort to get a clear run off, and then started to run off into the boil kettle. The wort looked nice and clear. After we completed the runoff and got our 7.5 gallons we checked the pre-boil gravity and found that we were about 2 points low, so we decided to boil the work for a little longer just to bring the OG to the desired gravity. We ended up at 1.054, and David was very happy with the result.
This was David's 3rd brew session on his new rig, and he is getting used to the routine and of getting his efficiency locked in. He's been making adjustments with every brew session ans is improving. This was his best session so far.

We completed the boil and chilled the wort using his home counter flow chiller and completed the brew session. Jeremy and Cheryl stopped by with an array of his amazing homebrew and we had a mini-beer tasting with David's friends and family. I brought a 2 liter growler of a Brown Porter that I made 4 weeks back and shared that with everyone too.

David had some Fullers Porter and some Fullers Pale Ale to have in between and everyone had a fantastic time.

Here's a few pics of the day's happenings:

Here's Davids new Brew Rig: