5 hour solo

On saturday September 5th we brewed up 10 gallons each of saison and dubbel. The next day Russ was at a family BBQ, and I was kicking around with nothing to do. Jenn asked me why I didn't brew during the day, and I had no good answer. With no work the next day, I decided it would be a good idea! This was around 4:15 in the afternoon, so I knew it would go late, but that's never stopped me. I've been wanting to do a nice dry Irish stout for quite a while, and figured this would be a good opportunity to test a new recipe. I consulted Designing Great Beers to get a feel for the recipe, and went to the basement to take a look at ingredients. Luckily we had everything I needed. I had to switch out regular chocolate malt for a bit of chocolate rye malt we had left, but I didn't think half a pound would make any difference if it was rye or not. I weighed out the total bill of 8 pounds of grain and got things ready in the garage. It really is pretty funny dealing with tiny amounts of grain after some of our monster brewdays of late. I think from coming up with the recipe to mashing in was about half an hour.

The crushed grain awaiting mash water.

Fast forward to me starting the vorlauf and rinsing the rest of the sugar our of the mash tun.

Adding the mash to the tun.

Stouty goodness!

me cleaning the keggle in preparation for sparging.

Checking the runoff while vorlaufing.

Adding the first runnings back in while it cleared up.

Now its ready for the sparge.

Looking pretty good going into the keggle.

Stout coming up to a boil.

You're gonna die, clown!

Everything was cleaned up, wort oxygenated, and yeast pitched and done by 9:15 pm. From recipe formulation to done in the house in under 5 hours is pretty good I think. Solo brewing isn't so bad when working with 5 gallon batches, I think I'll have to do it again!

Posted by viggo at September 7, 2009 10:46 AM