I'm still way behind my usual brewing volume, and tracking to be one of the least-amounts brewed in any year since I started.
At this point, I'm thinking it is unlikely I'll catch up to my "normal" amount this year ... but I guess we'll have to see.
Currently, I have 4 beers "on-tap", which is my maximum, but 3 out of my 4 kegs are very close to being empty.
So ... I may need to brew a few more batches soon.
Anyway ... the beer I brewed last week is an interesting experiment (interesting to me) ....
Yes, I brewed a "potato beer".
Way back in 2016, I brewed a Sweet Potato Beer called #WeAreGroot. For #WeAreGroot I cut up and mashed actual sweet potatoes.
For PBR, I used boxed flaked potatoes, which I thought would be less of a pain. I didn't have to cut, boil, and mash the flakes, so I guess it was a little less of a pain.
But, the flaked potatoes are a pain in their own way. The first thing I noticed was that it was extremely difficult to get all the "dough balls" out (potato balls?). With a bunch of stirring I guess I got them to an acceptable point, so that wasn't too terribly bad.
But ... even with rice hulls, the potato flakes were not very re-circulation friendly. I had the pump going very slow, and still got the dreaded "stuck mash".
Eventually, I just turned off the pump, so that was fine too.
Draining took a ridiculous long time. But, I wasn't really in a hurry, so I just let it go for a long time.
The mash absorbed much more water than my usual malted-grains do. I ended up having to add more than a whole gallon back to dilute.
The pre-boil volume / gravity was actually right on plan after the dilution water, so I guess the difficulties didn't seem to affect my mash / brewhouse efficiency.
Cleaning up the potato "gunk" was also more difficult than a regular malt-based beer clean up.
The boil actually went well. This particular recipe calls for quite a few hops, and I got them all in where I intended.
I caused my own issue with chilling. I pushed the wrong button on the power, so while I was chilling, my Foundry was still heating.
Surprisingly, my chiller still got the wort under 90 degrees. I decided to rack into the fermenter at the higher temperature and letting my fermentation cooling system bring the temperature down to pitching temperature.
It took a couple of hours.
I pitched and the fermentation started up pretty quickly. As of now, we are about a week into fermentation. I'll keg this up and probably start drinking soon.
Should be an interesting beer.
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