Saturday, May 10, 2008

Iris Red Ale #3 Brew Day May 9th, 2008

Man oh man what fun we had, this had to be the best looking brew so far. We heated up 3.5 gallons of water to 172 degrees and poured it into our mash tun, then added the grains little by little stirring around and mashing out the dry pockets. We did have a little clumping but got it out with no problem. Letting that set at 162 degrees for 60 minutes we prepared our sparge water.

This is when things got interesting, We got sparge water ready and I opened the valve on the mash tun but nothing. I tied down the grain bag over the manifold, so what could have possibly went wrong. then I remembered we didn't blow out the manifold after the last all grain batch, so we were stuck. Well from there we had to act quick, we hooked up the pump and forced it through, there was a healthy mouthful of old cold wort, once we got that through we unplugged the pump and drew out and sparged our wort.

Now to the hops, we bought some stainless steel hop balls and used 1oz of Cascade Whole Leaf and 1oz of Tettnang pellet. I couldn't find any Fuggles so I'm using dad's leftover tettnang for aroma on the rest of my experimental Irish Reds.

The boil went well, as we ran the hot wort through the thermenator I took a OG reading and it came out to be 1.060 which was at the top of the scale, added the yeast and away we go. A lot of fun this time, learned a few more things like blowing out the manifold every time we are done mashing.


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