Early this year I had just moved to all grain and successfully did 4 batches with my old tried and true set up and brewing space. I moved back in March and I finally have a basic brewing area set up and tried to brew a batch late yesterday afternoon. What A Disaster! Everything that could have gone wrong did and I had to improvise. And I mean everything!
- I made a recipe on Beersmith and could not get printers to work to print it. I just don’t print much at home :blah:
- After formulating the recipe, I could not locate one of the secondary grains and had to wing it with a substitution
- Heated my strike water and put it in the cooler before mashing in. When I started mashing in, there was no where near enough water, so I quickly heated up and added more. Moved my cooler up on a stone wall while it was mashing and walked away. Few minutes later, there was liquid running down the wall. I looked on the ground where I started mashing and there was a big pile of wet grain sitting there! I forgot to close the damn plug in the back of the cooler. So I scramble to scrape up what grain I could salvage and add back into the cooler and then I run and guesstimate that I lost 5-6 oz of grain - quickly grind up some more, heat MORE water and finally get something that resembles a normal mash consistency.
- The remainder of the mash and sparge went fine and I actually took a pre-boil gravity reading, which I usually do not do. It was dead on.
- End of the boil, I realize that I do not have enough ice for the bath I use for my cfc, so I send my son for a bag of ice, he comes back with 3 (thank god)
- Scramble to set up and sanitize my CFC and realize that my old system had a natural high tier for gravity feeding my hot wort, which I no longer have. Scramble Scramble and Set up something temporary
- Lug hot wort down the steps and put up on temp shelf. Make ice bath and turn on the little fountain pump I have, water shoots everywhere as the gasket was not set right.
- Fix gasket and turn on pump - no water through CFC. I try everything and nothing is working. The CFC was more elevated in this setup that my old one because of the temp shelf height
- In absolute Pi**ed Off mode, I disconnect pump and CFC and throw across room. My only option is to try to cool this using an ice bath. Full 5.3 gallons in a bucket. Thank god for 3 bags of ice and frozen water bottles. It took about 90 minutes, but I finally got it down to 70 degrees or so. GOOD ENOUGH!
- Finally aerate and add yeast starter.
The good news is that after all this, with my adjustments, my gravity was dead on. Couldn’t believe it. I am confident the beer will turn out great, but what an afternoon/evening. I was not having fun at the end. Lots of lessons learned and a very quick lesson in the stuff I need to figure out before the next session. Feel sorry for my wife and grown son as I was not very pleasant to be around for several hours.
