As I indicated in SheppyBrew 2020 Year-End Brewing Stats, 2020 was a busy brewing year. I also started 2021 with a brew day.
For Christmas, I received a new addition to my Anvil Foundry, the optional Recirculation Pump Kit.
When I first got the Foundry, I figured I'd try it without the pump kit and see how things went.
I still consider it optional, but the recirculation does provide some advantages that I thought were worth giving it a try, so I put it on my "gift list", and one of my family members bought it for me.
So, of course I had to try out the new toy. I thought a New Year's Day brew would be a perfect time to try it out.
The beer I brewed was the Winter Saison that I brew every year,
As an experiment, I thought I'd try an overnight mash to see if I was able to cut the actual brew day time down, so I mashed in my Anvil Foundry right before I went to bed on New Year's eve.
I left the controller on the Anvil set at 148 all night. When I got up, the controller read 148, but my floating thermometer at the top of the mash read 130ish.
At this point to save time, I probably should have drained the wort and started up for the boil, but I wanted to test out the pump as well, so I recirculated.
It took almost as much time to get the wort back up to mash-out temperature as a mash would have taken, so I did not save any time by mashing overnight.
At least I learned that over-night mashes don't really save me much time.... at least the way I did it.
Anyway ... I after getting to "mash out" temperature, the rest of the process was the same as usual.
I drained the wort and started getting the wort up to the boil.
I got hops and other boil additions into the wort as planned. I hit my numbers ... actually ended up a little high on pre-boil and original gravity.
It is possible that the overnight mash helped my efficiency.
It only took a few minutes to get the wort chilled into the 70's. I got the yeast pitched and cleaned up for about a 4 hour brew-day.
This is maybe a little shorter than average, but not by much.
After brewing, the family went for a snowy winter hike.
It was fun.
Fermentation took off pretty quick. The tilt is already reading below 1.010 SG, and I'm sure it will finish at or below 1.004 like usual for my saisons.
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Go Bears!
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