So Saturday night I brewed a new recipe, a Rye IPA with 20% rye malt and 10% crystal Rye.  Throw in a pound of wheat you have about 35% of the mash coming from grains with no husks.  A definate potential for a stuck mash.  But that sort of thing never happens to me. Nah.  It couldnt.

It did.

I mashed in at 155.  Let it sit for an hour.  Mashed out with two gallons.  Stirred well.  Opened the valve and a trickle greeted me.  A trickle continued.  I closed the valve. Stirred and scraped and Opened it up again.  A trickle.  I tried to push the fluid out the drain manually.  Nada.  It was really freaking stuck.  I ended up putting on kitchen gloves and cutting off the braid.  Even then, nothing but a trickle.  I ended up manually straining the grain with a colander and mesh bag.  I did the same for the sparge.  The boil ended up with massive amounts of grain in it.

I will off up this advice.

1. Keep a couple pounds of rice hulls in the house at all times.
2. If you are forced to manually mash, Use two strainer bags.  Over over the colander and one over the container you are draining into.  If I had done this I wouldn’t have had the grain problem.
3. I can and probably will happen to you one day.

I proceeded with the batch as planned.  It definitely has some additional bite. I have a good feeling I will end up serving it to people when they are too drunk to know any better.

This post is a great resource for foam free beer.  It is worth a read from front to back, if you every find your setup in that situation.

I just completed the brewing of the Wader Patch Wit. I’d like to say that it was smooth sailing and my family was not pushed to the wayside to make it happen, but then I’d be a liar. This was my first adjunct mash. A normal mash looks like this:

1. Crush Grain and put in cooler(Mash Tun)
2. Put 165 degree water on grain
3. Close Mash Tun wait 60 minutes (Conversion)
4. Drain Mash Tun
5. Rinse grains with hot water (Sparge) (repeat if necessary)

It really a pretty simple process and the end result a sugary wort, which when boiled with hops yields the product that will become beer.

Yesterday I brewed using grains that had not been malted. Malting in nutshell is taking raw grain(typically barley) letting it germinate, then dried it to stop the germination process. Basically its about making the starches available for conversion to sugar during the mashing process. I was using raw wheat and rolled oats to get a strong wheat flavor and creamy mouthfeel for the wit. In order to extract sugars from the wheat and oats this is the process (American Adjunct Mash) that had to be followed:

1. Crush Raw Wheat and Oats very finely. Wheat is MUCH harder than standard barley. So hard in fact that I had to enlist my family to help me crank it after I burnt out two drill batteries and one arm.
2. Heat Oats and Wheat with water to 122 degrees. Hold for 15 minutes.
3. Heat to 150. Hold for 15 minutes
4. Boil for 15 minutes.
5. Add to main mash (at 122 degrees)

The second list really isn’t a whole lot longer in steps, but the fact that I had another mash(the top list) going at the same time made it complicated. I did the adjunct mash using a five gallon stock pot which was filled almost to the top. Once I got the gruel to a specified temperature I used the oven preheated to warm then turned off to keep the grains at that temp. That worked pretty well, I only lost less than a degree with each temperature rest. Thank God I actually did the boiling portion outside on the propane burner or I would still be scraping off the ceiling. When that mess started bubbling I was really thankful that I had my trusty mash paddle. There is no way it could have come off without it.

I ended up with an average efficiency of 65%, I attribute this lower number to not crushing the oats and wheat fine enough. They should be grits consistency; mine were definitely coarser than that. The upside was I did not have any issues with my run off. I collected 10.5 gallons at 1.045, this should yield about 4.5% abv. It has nice straw like color and is happily fermenting away at 69 degrees in right now. I am targeting the first week of May for bottling.

On April 3rd my brother and I went down to the Chicago Ale House for Two Brothers Brewing 10 year anniversary party. It was also a release party for thier Kreik Lambic “10″. The brewers and some of their employees were there as well. Matt and I talked for about an hour to Jim Ebel as well as a salesman from Windy City Distributing. As things would have it I cant remember the sales guys name(he gave me his card and I need to find it).  He was a really cool guy and he ended up hang for a while talking beer. Now one may blame my poor memory on not being able to remember it but I think it was actually the 4 Cane and Ebels and 2 lambics.  Bottom line was we had a ton of fun and Matt even says I held my own in talking brewing with the guys, but me…Im not so clear on that part