Brewing 001 - Marble Red imitation (2.5gal)

Today an all-grain AmericanPA was created.

The grain-bill was off, lets hope it is a good mistake, but I put more Crystal 120L than the recipe suggested.

• 5.02 lbs, 2-Row
• 0.67 lbs, Vienna
• 0.67 lbs, Crystal 80L
• 0.67 lbs, Crystal 120L

We bought a crappy little mill from the local kitchen supply store, which broke about 3 lbs into the bill, so the remaining 3.5 lbs were crushed with a rolling pin...

It started with a 150F mash for 60 min. The cooler held the temp to the degree for the whole mash. The PVC lautering system was fabulous, and the flow control using the tube clamp was perfect. I simply poured the sparge water on-top of the plastic lid to protect the grain bed (even though it was quite thick).

When I got somewhere around 2.5 gal of wort I stopped the sparge, but the liquid was still quite sweet and colored. I would really like to have made a second batch of "house" brew with the remaining sugars in the grain, but I don't have the equipment to run parallel fermenters.

I forgot to measure the preboil gravity, stupid mistake...

The boil of course was a little tight in the 2.5 gal pot, it did of course end up boiling over.

Hop schedule was not exactly from the recipe either:

• 70 min Columbus (0.5oz)
• 10 min Citra (0.25oz), Simcoe (0.25oz), Cascade (0.375oz)
• 0 min Cascade (0.75oz)

At 10 min I also threw in the wort chiller. When the boil was done I stirred it up a bit, then chilled it down. The chiller worked great as well, took maybe 10 min. Dumped it in to the fermenter, stirred like craze to oxiginate, and pitched the yeast. Used WYeast 1056 American Ale yeast.

Postboil gravity was very hard to read, I had to extrapolate through the foam cap, somewhere around 1.065 I think. I hope it's mostly fermentable :)

Temperature today is a little warm, 71F, now it's fermenting so next update in a few days when the transfer to the secondary and dry-hopping happens.