Out Of Key Brewing

Since the debacle with the rye stuck mash I have brewed two more batches. One was a 10 gallon batch of Amber (really English bitter, but I am doubtful that my target audience wants to drink a beer I call ‘bitter’) and the other was five gallons of a Hoppy Wheat beer. Both batches went amazing. Efficiency was high. Runoff was smooth. I believe the reason for the smooth brewing sessions are directly related to my batch sparging manifold improvements.

I currently use the stainless steel water supply braid to filter my wort out of the mash tun. What I saw was that on most batches, when I cleaned the grain out of the tun, the 50% or more of the braid would have become crushed. This could have been as a result of the grain weight or also from some too vigorous stirring. I went to the hardware store and purchased about a 5 inch section of 3/8^th inch copper pipe. I then drilled about 25 large holes in this pipe. When I was done with it, the pipe looked like Swiss cheese, there was literally more holes than there was solid copper. I then inserted this section of copper into the manifold. The end result was I could literally stand on this thing without it getting crushed. Now I’m not a huge guy, but I weigh in at 180. I am doubtful that I will ever have that much grain in this system.

Additionally, this also let me do was crank the Barley Crusher down to about .033 which yielded efficiency of 79% and 87% in those sessions. The next step will be a version of Denny Conn’s
Bourbon Vanilla Imperial Porter. This should be a good test for the system because this will be the first big (1.086) beer brewed on the system.