Wednesday, August 28, 2013

My First Home Brewing Disaster

Last week was a busy home brewing time for me, as I was trying to get the most in during a week where I didn't have my son. So first on Wednesday I bottled a Russian Imperial Stout that has been sitting in the secondary fermenter for around 6 1/2 months. My friend Josh came over to help me out, and I'm extremely thankful for that, as anyone who has bottled before knows, it's a long and tedious process. So by Josh helping me out, he definitely saved me a couple hours of work.

All ready to bottle!
Then I followed it up the next day on Thursday by brewing up a new batch of beer. This was going to be a clone of 3 Floyds - "Zombie Dust", and I was going off of the recipe that is posted on HomeBrewTalk.com. If you can't tell by the name of this post....it was an absolute yard sale.

  • 6 lb Extra Light Dry Extract
  • 1 lb Munch 10L
  • .50 lb Cara-Pils or Carafoam
  • .50 lb Crystal 60L
  • .50 lb Melnoiden Malt
  • 9 oz of Citra Hops
  • S-04 Fermentis SafAle dry yeast (I went with S-05 instead via recommendation at Taylor's Pantry in Sioux Falls, SD)
"Grocery shopping" at Taylor's Pantry for ingredients

This was probably the most organized and confident I've ever been on a brew day, I had all my equipment cleaned, my checklist of everything I needed, so I was all set to brew this thing up right after work. After filling up my propane tank after work (just in case my other one ran out) I went home and ate something really quick because I wanted to get started. Now take in mind this was my first time ever doing the entire brewing process by myself, however I am getting more and more confident with the process as I brew more beers, so I wasn't too scared about doing this alone. So I got my garage all setup and the ingredients on hand, utensils and the kettle and burner ready to go. Now this was the first time I've had to crush grains as a part of an extract recipe, so I had to borrow Rich's mill to do it. Rich said all I needed was a drill to turn the mill and crush the grains, so I didn't worry about it, I have a drill in my garage. Well as I'm sure Blake would attest to, my drill is not the most powerful one on the market. So when I hooked it up to the mill after measuring my grains out, it wasn't even strong enough to turn the mill at all. I tried charging it up for awhile to no avail, it still wouldn't crush any grains. So I had to get on the phone and start texting all my friends because I have to get these things crushed in order to move on, so I was stuck in limbo. Finally Wade was able to bring over a drill that he had, and he helped me crush the grains and dump them into a steeping bag. AT this time I'm already running about 1 1/2 hours later than I had hoped.
Thought I was all set and ready to go...
Rich's grain mill.
Wade stuck around for awhile and the next few steps weren't too hard, we steeped the grains for about 45 minutes, then cranked up the heat and got it boil, then stirred in the DME and added the first addition of hops and set the timer for a 60 minute boil. Wade ended up leaving after awhile to go back home, but this part wasn't too tough, I just watched the timer, kept to the hop schedule, stirred the wort and made sure I didn't have a boil over. So aside from just being delayed a long time, I was starting to feel good again about brewing because I had calmed down and actually opened a beer to drink.

Steeping the grains.
Where everything started to go down hill, was cooling the wort down after the 60 minute boil was over. I have a stainless steel wort chiller and had already cleaned/sanitized it, but I finally got the hoses hooked up and the water turned on. I sat there dunking that wort chiller in there for a long time back and forth and was struggling to get the temperature any lower than 73-75 degrees....which wasn't good, I was aiming for mid to upper 60s. I started looking up home brewing tips on my phone and came across someone saying that when it's really hot outside, it's common for the water coming out of the ground and through the house to not be cold enough to cool the wort down very far. It then went on to suggest putting your remaining water that you have to add to the water, in the fridge, so I ran inside and I put one gallon in the fridge, and one in the freezer. So finally after a couple more minutes of using the wort chiller, I brought the kettle into the house and set it in the kitchen.

I am now coming to the part that I had not thought through, of how I was going to get the wort from the kettle, through a filter and a funnel and into the glass carboy. After several different awkward attempts, I finally got into a system of sitting above the glass carboy, put the kettle up on the table, and used the siphon and tubing to pour through the strainer and funnel that I was holding. The next problem was due to all the hops there was a lot of muck built up in the strainer, so I had to bring in a clean/sanitize spoon and the garbage can so that I could keep moving it around in order for the liquid to drain through. This became a very long process, and during the middle of it, I had heated up a glass container to get ready for hydrating my yeast, and while I was transferring, I heard the glass container shatter into a million piece in the kitchen. This caused me to jump, which resulted in me losing control of the tubing so it shot wort on the floor and all over my lap before I got it back towards the carboy. This was pretty much my breaking point where I was so close to just saying "Screw this!" and going to bed.

Even thought I was never really able to calm myself down, I got up and cleaned up the kitchen and swept/vacuumed the floor from all the glass that shattered, finished transferring the beer, and boiled up some more water to hydrate the yeast. Then I was able to add the cold water that I had put in the fridge, and it definitely helped bring the temperature of the wort down to 66-68 degrees. My OG turned out to 1.048 which was a lot lower than the recipe had indicated (1.066 I believe). After some brief/quick clean up efforts following pitching the yeast, I went to bed with my heart still pounding and slept like absolute crap. I kept thinking that I just messed up this beer, and that's $70 wasted in ingredients.
I have calmed down since, and have realized that there were three main things that I learned from this whole process that would've made it gone smoother:
  1. Need to have a backup plan in case it is really warm outside and the wort chiller isn't able to get the temperature down far enough.
  2. Get a more powerful drill.
  3. NEVER BREW ALONE.....EVER!!
While I may be familiar with the entire and process of home brewing, I will never do it alone again due to the all the different awkward processes I encountered. I am still paranoid on how this beer is going to turned out (especially since I was gone all weekend so I wasn't able to see fermentation activity in the airlock), but after talking with several other home brewers, it seems like everyone has a disaster story like this at some point during their home brewing journey.

3 comments:

  1. I've had a couple flasks break. I thought they would be tougher, but they are more fragile than I expected.

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  2. Same here, I've heated one up for a yeast starter before and it was fine. This time it happened as it was cooling down on an oven mit...

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  3. Hopefully things will be stabilized in a couple weeks and we'll be back to Anderhoff brewing. I can't leave you alone for 2 minutes.

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