Saturday, my SIL wanted to brew so I put together a quick recipe for a 10G batch of beer. 17lbs 2 row, 2lbs corn meal and 3 cans of cream style corn(15oz) plus a gallon or so of water. I did a cereal mash of 2lbs 2 row and the adjuncts. I mixed the cereal mash on the stove and slowly raised the temp to 154’. When it hit 154’, I placed the lid on it and put it aside. My SIL was heating the water for the beer while I was doing this. When the strike water was at temp, we blended the 2 row and the adjuncts together in his cube style mash tun. His tun has a small loop of braided hose that has worked pretty good on previous batches. Everything was doing fine, we mashed in at 152’ and left it alone for a hour, stirring once in awhile (we are batch spargers). After we vorlaufed a gallon or so the wort was clear enough to drop.
We opened the valve and the wort slowed down to a dribble. We mixed up the mash again and added 1lb or so of rice hulls, vorlaufed and we had the same result. I went home and grabbed my rectangular mash tun. My tun has 2 copper headers with 4 braided hoses. So we dumped everything into my tun and we did the same vorlaufing. Again, the wort was coming out at a small dribble. It took over 5 minutes to fill our pail at the 1 gallon marker. We just laughed because at least the tun was draining. It took some time to fill the boil kettle. As a side note, we FWH with 1 oz Sterling hop pellets, 1 oz Sterling at 40 and 1 oz Sterling at 15 minutes. 12g in the fermenter with a 1.054 starting gravity.
I looked over at his handed written make sheet and he wrote," Don’t make this again " for the name of his beer. I fell over laughing. Next time we’ll use a nylon sock with the adjuncts. It really wasn’t a bad day because his friends were there drinking beer and watching college basketball.
After all, it was just fun brew day.
