Speckled Heifer Mark II

Strike water!

You may have noticed that the Nitrog-inator has two taps. It's also the case that my wife is going through the Speckled Heifer pretty quickly. Can you see where I'm going with this one? Superbowl Sunday I was having a party, but that didn't start until the afternoon. I had a whole morning to work with!

A simple, pale grist.

I got up around 0630 and got right to work with the grain I'd measured out the night before. I added a pound of 2-row, since I missed my gravity last time and had to supplement with dry malt extract (DME). I didn't have any light DME on hand this time, so that wasn't going to be an option. Got the strike water heating, treated it with a campden tablet to neutralize chlorine and chloramine, and got to milling my grain. Because I was working under time pressure, I did a lot of things preemptively. In some cases this really helped, but in others it turned out to be a mistake. I over-acidified the sparge water, winding up with a pH in the mid 4s (I usually shoot for just below 6). I tossed in some baking soda to fix that, but it was a waste of 88% lactic acid. Oh well.

Clear sweet wort.

The mash and sparge went well, and I actually wound up overshooting the pre-boil gravity again, but just by a few points. Because this is a low-gravity beer to begin with, the last runnings dipped below 1.008 about 2 gallons short of my pre-boil volume. I topped off with water and still had a few extra gravity points. The boil was uneventful, but I did have an "I'm such an idiot!" moment during the chill. I have always wondered about the best way to sanitize my chiller (a counterflow chiller). Usually I do a really good job of flushing it out after every batch (in both directions) with very hot water. I also have tried to let some boiling hot wort sit in it before I turn on the chilling water, but this never works, because by the time the wort gets through the chiller, it's lost enough heat to the water already in there and to the copper in the chiller.

Pre-boil and post-boil gravity.

I finally had the "duh" moment of just draining the chiller right back into the kettle. That allows me to recirculate the boiling hot wort, sanitizing the chiller quite effectively. Additionally, by chilling while I recirculate, with the wort pump open full bore, I get a much more efficient chill. The heat differential between the wort and the water is maintained, and Newton's Law of Cooling tells us that increases heat transfer rates. Before I used to run directly into my fermenters, which meant running at a trickle. The chiller couldn't get the wort from boiling to pitching temperatures in one pass unless it was basically just dripping through. That wasted a ton of water. Now I get a sanitized chiller and a faster chill. I just watch the thermometer on the chiller output, wait until it gets to pitchable temps, and then I can fill my fermenters on full blast. So much faster, and so much less water is wasted. One thing that might help in the future, though, is actually turning the stupid heating element off before chilling. I was wondering why the temperatures weren't dropping as fast as I thought they should. Wow, I felt like a moron.

Vacuum-sealed ingredients.

Because I may make this recipe again a lot in the future (it seems to be a big hit), I decided to package up some of my ingredients to make preparing the grist much simpler. I vacuum-sealed the proper amounts of flaked barley, flaked maize, and Carapils. Now I just need to add the requisite amount of 2-row, and I'm ready to brew.

I had everything done, including cleanup and pitching the yeast by the time the first guest showed up for my party. And yeah, I'm going to put half of this on nitro next to the dry Irish stout. I'll let you know how that goes.