I have been brewing for quite a while now and really have my system down pat. So getting ready for a brew is nearly autopilot, but that was not always the case. It used to be an agonizing time of preparations, calculations and non-stop worry about forgetting something important.
So what happened to all of the prep work? Oh it’s still there. We are just so used to doing it, we’re not noticing it. I thought it would be fun to look at just what it is to plan a beer from the beginning nowadays.
I’m gonna brew tomorrow so I’ll keep track of everything I’ll do to get ready for it just so you can see how things come together.
For this brew I will using the Mash and boil with mesh bag liner in the basket. I’ll leave the regular mash tuns for another article down the road.
Day Before Brew
Since I’m not really trying to brew anything to style or for an event, this will be mostly just to fill a keg for the garage, and to clean out some inventory.
So what I have is 10 lbs of Munich. A bunch of Magnum. A ton of Cascade, and a bit of Perle.
Out that that bunch I think the Perle or the Magnum would be the best bet for the Munich,, and these Magnum are getting old now. I might as well do a Smash beer and get rid of them.
Ok, need a yeast. Since I don’t wanna haul things down to the basement if I don’t have to, maybe now is the time to try that Kveik yeast. Its gonna be a cooler weekend so maybe this will work ok out in the garage. I should be able to keep it under 100,, but keeping it stable might be a problem. Too bad! Doing it anyway! Stopping at HoH on way home to grab the yeast.
So we have 10lbs Munich, 3oz Magnum hops, and Kveik yeast. Lets get it plugged into Beersmith.
Because these Magnums are getting old I think I will lower the alpha a bit because I can tell they aint bittering quite the same as when they were fresh. They were originally 12 alpha.. I’ll drop them to 10.
Looks like we’re in the ballpark to at least call it an Alt by the numbers, but this Kveik yeast is gonna mess that up. Stonefruit is not really an Alt thing… but we will see.
Now that we have numbers we can look at getting water ready. While I do use Beersmith for recipe formation, I just cannot get the water volumes to come out right for Biab profiles. It does for the mash tun,, but the Biab profiles always is about ¼ gallon off.
What I’m looking at for this recipe is 7.70 total water. That is about quart more than I can heat all at one time in the Mash and Boil. So what I’m gonna do is heat 5.7 gallons for mashing, and 2 gallons for sparge.
I have all my stuff out in the garage for summer, so I get my water from the basement tonight yet.
Already have my filter hooked so just gonna fill my container and get back out there and fill to 5.7 gallons, and save the rest for sparge.
Gonna add my campden now while I’m thinking of it, and set my delay for 5am. Im mashing at 152, so will set the temp for 155. It will drop a little, but will the heat will kick in as I’m stirring in so don’t need to be much over.
So that’s it for water prep. Now gonna go down and mill the grains so they are ready to go. Gonna use the whole 10 lbs so I wont have to weigh anything out. Mill is already set up so just crank them thru and we done.
Hops and yeast are in the fridge, so I am ready to go with ingredients. All my other equipment is outside and ready to go. Spoon, recirc pitcher, thermometer, refractometer, Star san, chiller.
In the morning when I get out there to mash in I will bring a fermenter up to clean and sanitize. That’s it for tonight.
(note: All the prep to this point could have been done the day of brew while the water is heating, but since I’m starting at 5am I wanna have it ready to go)
Day of Brew
Welcome to 5am Saturday morning.
First things first. Make coffee.
I love the delay timer. I walk out here at 5 and my water is sitting here waiting for me at 155F. so now that i had everything already set up last night.
Get my grain stirred in and temp up to 152,, and set the hour timer, and shut down the machine. I dont want heating up according to its own thermometer. (you’ll see why in a little while probably.)
In this hour of mashing i am getting the chiller and hose rinsed up a bit, and the fermenter rinsed, sanitized and ready to go, and also took the yeast out of the fridge.
About 45 min into the mash I’m taking a temp reading to see where we are,, and its sitting at 151. only lost a degree. (inboard probe says lost 7 degrees but it really wasn’t and would have turned on the heat when it didn’t have to)
Hour up! lift the basket and start draining. after we get a good drain going I’m gonna start recirculating to get some of the particles out. I will also now crank the heat up to start heading to boil as we recirc. After about 5 minutes the wort is very clear of junk. I’ll let this drain out, then start adding the sparge water.
As you may have noticed, I did not heat my sparge water. I’m just gonna use it at garage temp of 70. Soon as the grain tube drains I’ll take it off and dump the bag and grains. Get all this cleaned up.
Let go see where we are with the wort to see if we need to address problems. Now is the time to check for this stuff, because there is time to fix anything yet. Once you start boiling and adding hops, its a bit late.
Ok our pre boil volume is supposed to be 6.9 hot. We got….
So we good there. Our preboil gravity is supposed to be 1.042,, but we are sitting at 1.048,, so we got a little better efficiency than what I had Beersmith set at,, which was 75%
Now we are just waiting for the boil to start. We have everything cleaned and put away that we dont need, we have the hop charges set out and ready, the fermenter is sanitized, chiller is waiting..
We hit boil. Set my timer for 45 min and add the first ounce of Magnum.
While are at high boil, I will run a few pitchers of boiling wort thru the drain tube to clean and sanitize it.
At 15 minutes left I put the chiller in and the Irish moss. At 5 minutes I added the last 2oz of the hops.
As soon as we hit zero, I cut all power and unplugged. Started the water thru the chiller and get stirring.
I got it down to 85 as thats what the garage is right now. gonna give it a whirlpool stir and let everything settle out.
Drain it to the fermenter, pitch the Kveik at 85,, and we are done. I will have to cover it good out here because the sun will be shining in side here in a couple hours.
9stripe Brewing 
[…] my garage would then be the perfect place to brew a Kveik yeast beer. Last summer I did my first Kviek brew in the garage. and it turned out to be great! So I knew I had to make the most of this heat wave. Thought that […]
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