Yuma Brewers

J’s 10 lb Honey Nut Oatmeal Brown

Well, we’ve finished our first full grain, and we’re calling it the Ten Pound Brown. There was a lot to get done. We all recovered from Kazapalooza the night before and finally got into swing of things for round two of the Birthday festival around 3. Jason and Chuck did a quick equipment check to see what we still needed to get the Keg Kettles up and running then jetted to the Hardware store to get it taken care of. Matt got cranking on the Brats, and I started up a the Rasberry wheat kit as a warmup. With the newly completed (and ass kicking) kettles, we built up the three tiered tower of brew, got the counterflow chiller working, and were ready to go.

Things started off a bit rocky. It’s important to note that you need to heat the water up BEFORE you add it to the grains, but we expected mistakes the first time through, and it was an easy fix. We’ll need to stir the grains more often in the future. The brewmometer picks up pockets and won’t change, and we ran into a lot of uneven heating. I think it worked to our advantage, though, because the unevenness made up for a lot of me not having locked down temp control yet, and we ended up with sweet tasting wort that should turn into a damn fine beer. Check out the rest below… (more…)