Back in Black
After a 18 month break from brewing, I’ve finally managed to clear some space in my garage and my schedule so that I could brew. So far, I’ve brewed a Dry Stout, Dunkelweizen, Pilsner, Hobgoblin, and Juleale, mostly 10 gal batches apart from the Hobgoblin. The beers have tasted fine, but the brewdays themselves didn’t go down as smoothly: the march MMP-1 pump stopped working after dismantling for cleaning, the hopscreen in the BoilerMaker got clogged, and trying to correct the mash temp seemed like a wild goose chase of countless infusions, and brewing indoors on a 2.2 kW hob is a bad idea since it takes literally 2 hours to bring the strike water up to temperature. But, some useful lessons learnt:
- putting in all the bits back into the pump head is a bad idea, especially a little ferrite washer. Leaving it out is the right thing to do and will make the pump work. (Really!)
- recirculating the mash is a good thing – it removes a lot of flour and grain particulate that might otherwise clog the filters the wort meets on it’s way out from the boil kettle.
- If you’re going to siphon out the wort from a clogged boil kettle, use a siphon with a plug on the bottom, or you’ll just suck up hops and block the siphon. And really don’t try the same thing again with the auto-siphon.
- it’s possible, but unpleasant to live without an auto-siphon.
But this is all part of the fun, and long as some enjoyable beer comes out the other end, I’m happy!
Cheers!
