Juneteenth Brew Day

I keep forgetting that Juneteenth is a holiday that I get off work.

It always comes as a pleasant surprise when I see it on my calendar. This year, it popped up on Wednesday of this week.

I've been running low on what I had on tap, and so I decided to brew Wednesday.

Summer Lovin' American Wheat (Batch 357) was also ready to keg, so I was able to clear out that fermenter as well.

If you follow along on this blog, you might have caught that I had another Roll-a-style beer coming up ... Roll-a-Style 20 ... 20A. American Porter.

I brewed a slightly modified recipe from that post:

Nargles American Porter

If you took a look at the recipe link, you might have noticed that I tried sparging with this batch. I usually do a full-volume mash with the Foundry. I thought I'd try seeing if I could get better brew-house efficiency with a full sparge.

I had pre-heated the strike water overnight, so when I got up at 5:30 or so, I was able to just get started with the mash.

I did prepare my full volume of mash and sparge water with the water additions and then pulled off 2.75 gallons to store in my old small kettle.

I had the mash going by 5:45 or so.

Once the mash was going, I zested oranges for Summer Lovin' Wheat, and then kegged the beer into a keg with the zest in a muslin hop bag.

I also got almost another gallon of beer in a growler.

While mashing and kegging, I heated up the sparge water on my stovetop.

After about an hour of mashing, I drained the wort's first runnings and then simply poured the kettle of water over the grains.

I must have done something wrong setting up the mash profile, because the amount of sparge water was too much, and my pre-boil gravity was low.

Had I done a quick sanity check (aka simple math) ... I probably would realized the error and fixed it.

Regardless, I'll have to give the Foundry / sparge a try in a future batch.

I ended up adding .5 lbs DME and also boiling about 15 minutes longer. This combination got me pretty close to the right pre-boil gravity.

The boil went as expected.

Chilling went fine.

I racked the wort onto the whole yeast cake of Summer Lovin'. Because of this, the fermentation was rocking by early afternoon.

I was mostly cleaned up before 10AM.

By the next day, the beer had already attenuated almost 40 points.

I got a nice "Juneteenth bike ride" in after brew day.

Considering how fast brewing is going, I might be able to keg this pretty early.

I'll be sure to share how it turns out.

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