Colour on the Vine!

I meant to put this picture up after I got back from the vineyard in Wilsonville but I completely forgot in my exhaustion. We'd spent two days covering all the plants with netting so the birds and deer can't get to them. Both early days but not terribly long days but all the bending and squatting (thank goodness for knee pads!) and a few moments of crawling really left me hurting. I think I came home and went to bed pretty early both days. This vineyard has color gathering, and the one in Alsea didn't. I wonder what that means for production overall?

3B recipe

3.8# Malted Buckwheat
1.5# corn sugar
1# rice solids extract
1.5# Buckwheat honey
2oz Hallertaur @ 45
10z Willamette @ 10
1oz Styrian Goldings @ 30
.2 oz Amylase enzyme added to mash at 148 degrees for 1 hour.
Nottingham dry yeast

Mash in at 110, protein rest for 30 min, 1.5 gallons
Raised temp to 150 held temp between 140-149 with the added amylase for 1.5 hours.

OG 1.041/ 4 gallons

I ended up with a much lower gravity than expected and not a full 5 gallons, so we decided to not add more water and leave it at 4 gallons. I may decide to add more rice extract dissolved in a little water to see if i can get the yeast ferment further when I move it to the secondary.

Krausen!!!

Well the panic has been thwarted! I was worried yesterday when I didn't see more activity. Apparently the little beasties have gotten over their shock of being moved from a small glass container or warm water to a gigantic container of food. I might have to do a bit of feeding this batch with some honey and water in a week. I'm going to be doing some reading up on adding body to gluten-free beers that are not lagers.

This little baby is sitting in the laundry room where it stays in the mid 60s. I think at the tail end of the fermentation I'm going to crash cool it in the fridge for a few days and try to get as much yeast to fall out as possible. I think I might also do a secondary aging for a few weeks to a month or so depending on how it tastes.

Cool down in record Time!

This deserves its very own post. I did not check the weather before I started brewing today. Imagine how not happy I was to realize that we were going to be in the 90+ weather and I was going to have to cool the wort down to under 80 quickly.

I had that chiller prepped and running and sanitizer before I brought the pot out. I dunked it in and then ran in the house and started to rehydrate the dry yeast. I was desperately hoping that I could get it down to under 80 in like 20-25 minutes. I guess the brew goddess was with me today because I got it to 78 in like 20 minutes, which was better than I hoped for. I had to do this in the yard close to bushes because that is where the shade was at 3pm.

Brought it in the house and poured it into the carboy with the waiting 1.5 gallons of cold water. It seemed to take longer because I had to clear the funnel screen of all the irish moss that clogged it. Barnaby had come over to see how things were going and get a taste of the wort and he said it was a little thin. That's what we were afraid of...well that and a super low gravity. If necessary I can add some water and honey later to during the fermentation process but right now I'm not terribly concerned. We ended up with about 4 gallons of wort and a gravity of 1.041.

With this information I can tweak the next batch of buckwheat and not make it gluten free, but I think I'll look online and see if there are other ingredients we can add to it to build body. This would explain why GF free beers are lagers, they tend to the thin side in comparison to ales in my opinion.

The Mashout and the Boil

Oh so heavy! I really need to think about rigging something to hold the grains suspended over the pot so I don't physically have to do it. My delts got quite the workout. On the right is the bag of BW in a strainer over a pot to drain. On the left is the wort on the verge of boiling. I decided to only do 45 minute boil because I wasn't looking to have a lot of hop flavor just enough. Not to mention that I was using really low Alpha hops, aroma hops to be specific. I'm sure there's a reason that you don't use aroma for bittering, besides the obvious.

This went relatively well, especially because this time I put the hops in a bag and not let them run willynilly all through the pot, like grade schoolers. I was always a firm believer that children should be confined, and now I think the same should go for leaf hops. Once I got the boil going on I could do the extract additions whenever I wanted, except for the honey I added that at the 10 minute mark.

The Mash

Ok so now we've moved into the official letting it sit for 45 minutes until conversion. I added the enzymes and soon will be heating up the sparge water and then it's off to a boil and extract additions. This GF is done without any sorghum extract, which I believe is somewhat unusual.

Barnaby wants a low alcohol, lightly hopped, fairly dry beer. I'm hoping I can make that happen. I took a reading of the decoction and I had 0 brix. I had a 0 brix in the mash. Now I'm about 30 minutes into it after adding the amylase at under 150 degrees and I took a reading and I got a brix of 5. A significant jump which tells me that there is conversion happening. I don't expect the efficiency to be high on this at all.

The picture to the right is a sample I took. It would be awesome if the end resulting color was that but I think it might end up a little darker. To the right is the decoction. I think it went ok. It definitely raised my temperature and I was mashing at temps between 140-149 because I was adding amylase enzymes.

BW Brew Day!

So today I woke up at 845am and knew in my bones that I just had to brew today. I've put it off and put it off for about a week. I know the reason. I haven't wanted to undertake a task as big as partial-mashing because not only am I PMing I'm also doing so with BW, an ingredient I have never worked with. My notorious procrastination tool is to read, read, read about a subject in the hopes of circumventing any problems that come my way.

As you can see I'm using that nifty partial mash technique I found on HBT where I mash in the pot on the stove and use the mesh bag to teabag the grains (though technically BW isn't a grain it's a fruit).

My various pots on the stove. The really large one in the back is the brew kettle but I'm mashing in this smaller one. I'm really hoping I get some fermentable sugars from the BW and not just a nice dark color.