The goal for the day was to have the father of the bride from Saturday’s wedding and my father-in-law join the brewing fray while sharing a couple beers and intermittently watching the Pats kick the Jets tail.
Great goals. Just too many of them.
See, since my CO2 tank ran out, I couldn’t rack a beer or two to free up a carboy. But a new bigmouth bubbler had arrived this week. And yet, I realized that all my airlocks and stoppers were used up. So, on the way home from church Rob and I stopped by the local home brew shop. Problem was, they were closed. While searching the brewery for an old one that might be lying around or if I had the makings of a blowoff tube, I spotted a carboy full of a chinook IPA I brewed a few years ago before things went south with the kegerator. That airlock and stopper wouldn’t fit the bigmouth bubbler, so I dumped that thing and got it cleaning in some Oxyclean.
All this while answering questions, talking, and heating strike water, which is why I over heated the strike water. So, while that was cooling, more cleaning, more talking, and more getting distracted. of course now the water is too cold. So, we quickly open up the grain, mash in, get a temp reading and then heat up more water to raise the temp. Never quite got it where it needed to be. And that accounts for my low gravity numbers.
During the boil, I was dissatisfied with the progress the Oxyclean was making on some residual hop matter ring. Not having a carboy brush any longer, I puzzled what to do. After a while, Eric went all Eagle Scout on me and recommended bending a hanger. Perfect!
Rather than a yeast starter, I decided to dump two vials of the WLP002.
I began heating the garage up for two purposes, diacetyl rest for the Dunkel and Pilsner and to be at the lower range of fermentation temp for the ESB. Raising that temp got the Dunkel bubbling away again.
Now still at the high end of lager temp, slightly below ale, the yeast for the ESB is getting crazy flocculant already. No krausen build up yet, but the flocculation is really interesting at this stage.
We’ll see how this goes.
Conversion Brew Co. 