Long Busy Day

Today was a long, super busy day that started at 6 am and ended at ~230pm. First thing this morning was the 75 minute mash for the Anniversary Barleywine. We normally mash for about 45 minutes for normal strength beers (6%-ish, gravity about 1.060) but when you are brewing super high gravity beers (today's BW was 1.119) you want the wort to be more attenuative. By mashing lower at 149-150 (instead of the normal 153-154) different enzymes are more active at that temperature and break up long-chain proteins found in beer. These proteins are what give the sense of "body" in the beer, so by changing the mash temp we can essentially control the body of the final product. By mashing higher (>156) we would have more long-chain proteins in the wort that are not metabolized by the yeast because the short-chain proteins are easier for them to eat. There will be more of these long-chain proteins left after fermentation, a higher final gravity, and more body in the beer. Mashing lower (less than 153) creates more short-chain proteins in the mash which the yeast will metablize easier leaving a higher alcohol beer that is drier because of the lower final gravity.




With the left over grains from the BW we added more water to the mash to make a second beer. This techinique is called "partigyle" in which multiple beers are made from one mash. Historically, this was how all beer was made, and the first runnings (or first "gyle") was the strongest beer that went to the Royals, the second gyle went to the commoners, and the last gyle went to the slaves/workers. Our second beer came in around 1058, which will make about a 5.5% beer. I was hoping to have a little smaller beer of around 4.5%, but since I added some more grains (for color and body) to the mash before the second round of water was added, the gravity came out a little higher than anticapted. Hopefully it will turn out OK, and even if it doesnt, it only cost an extra $3 for a little less than 3 gallons of beer.





Third item on the agenda today was bottling the Porter we that brewed 2 weeks ago. I forgot to buy more bottle caps, so I only had 31 caps available and filled about 42 bottles before I realized I wouldnt have enough caps. We were saving a bunch of bombers (22 oz) for the BW, but I had to use about 12 of them to be able have enough caps to bottle all of our beer. So we will be drinking a lot of porter in the next few months so we can get the bombers back for the BW bottling sometime in May. This batch of porter came in at about 5.5% and the yeast cake was split 3 ways. About 150 mL of it went to the BW and ~60 mL went to the Small Beer. The rest (~500 mL) was saved in a glass jar and will be used in some future batches of beer.



I finally took some pictures of the grain mill in action,





Step 1. Measure grains

Step 2. Hook up a drill and mill the grains

Milled grain: