Brew Day #2 April 26th, 2007

Pretty good day all around, learned a few things and refined a few things.

This is the first time we used the brewing stand that my dad has, I thought it worked out pretty well.

I started the morning cleaning every thing and warming up the coolers, Wolfe again was there to help out and about 9:24 am we got started with the Mash.

Added my grains first to the tun, and add four gallons of 170 degree water, still was only able to reach 140 during the mash.

Question that still need to be asked.

1. Do I add my grains before or after the water?
From Wade at Homebrewtalk.com
Add your grains after the water is what Ive read or you will get lumpy grains. Try keeping your grains in a warm spot for an hour or 2 before adding them to the water.

2. How hot should I prepare my strike water?

Next we mashed and steeped grains for 60mins

then heated up 5 gallons of 190 degrees water and added it to the sparge cooler, and began to drain I collected about 2 gallons of the wort and added it back to the sparge.

then drained out as much water as I could, I still need to mark up the brew kettle to have some sort of an idea of how much wort I collect.

We started boiling about 10:30 am, added all the hops on schedule and set up the the wort chiller ran two hoses for water in and water out.

Collected wort in fermenting bucket at 63 degrees, added yeast and waited for the bubbling to start.

total time to brew #2 3hrs and 15mins

Things learned during this brew session

1. Need to secure the grain bag over the manifold in the mash tun with a zip tie (thanks to dad)
2. Use pump to transfer sparge water to cooler.

not to bad of a day expect for dad's batch as that was a little entertaining.



My second batch of the the Irish Red Ale project