Lagerhead Turtle Recipe

So I put together the Lagerhead Turtle recipe a few days ago, and brewed it last night. Here's the basic recipe:

5.00 lb Pale Malt (2 Row) US (2.0 SRM) Grain 46.51 %
4.00 lb White Wheat Malt (2.4 SRM) Grain 37.21 %
1.00 lb Wheat, Torrified (1.7 SRM) Grain 9.30 %
0.25 lb Aromatic Malt (26.0 SRM) Grain 2.33 %

60 min 1.00 oz Cascade [5.50 %]
7 min 1.00 oz Tettnang [4.50 %]
0 min 0.50 cup Lemon Balm

Add pastuerized honey at high krausen

Primary fermentation (14 days at 50.0 F)
Diacetyl rest (3 days at 60.0 F)
Secondary fermentation (14 days at 52.0 F)
Lager (60 days at 35.0 F)

Full Recipe

My father-in-law, David Roche, helped out with brewing this beer. (It was a great bonding experience! :-) ) We ended up a few points short of the pre-boil gravity. I have a feeling, I didn't get my sparge hot enough, and may have been a bit too warm on my mash temps.

There are conflicting ideas on how to pitch the yeast for a lager. Some say that cooling the wort to fermentation temp then pitch work best, while others prefer to pitch near ale temps, then cool down slowly to fermentation temp. For simplicity sake, I chose the latter. However, doing this will produce enhanced diacetyl (buttery tones) to the beer, so we'll be doing a diacetyl rest at the end of the primary fermentation to allow the yeast to clean up the diacetyl produced.

This will also be my first beer with honey, and herbs. We added the lemon balm at flameout, and will add local honey to the primary during high krausen. I'm not quite sure how this will turn out yet, but I'm excited to try. I don't want to get too strong of a lemon flavor in there, but if I can't discern any after primary fermentation, I may dry hop some more lemon balm in the secondary.

Prost!

Jeremy

Spent Grains

Switching to the all grain brewing process presents a new waste stream in our household. A waste stream of sugarless barley, wheat, oats, and other grains. So far we have come up with 2 great ways to help us reuse this waste stream into something else.

The first and easiest way to reuse our spent grains is to compost them! Leah and I have been composting our kitchen scraps for well over a year now. We had purchased 2 60 gallon pickle barrels from Mt. Olive pickle company for $5 each! That's about 10% the cost of buying them brand new! They still had a bit of pickle smell in them, but a good rinsing, and a week out in the sun made them smell good as new.

Before last week, our compost was aerated about once a week by turning the barrel on its side, and rolling it about the yard. This however failed to mix the compost up properly, and also failed to introduce oxygen to the lower half of the barrel. Oxygen is necessary for composting bacteria (kinda like aerating the wort).

Composter Design

A couple weeks back I designed a tumble style composter that rotated about an axis in the middle of the barrel. You can see the design I created in Delcam Powershape (free for personal use) to the right.

The materials included 38 ft of 2x4s, 12 1/2" bolts, and a 1 1/4" conduit pipe.

Scott and I built the whole thing in less than 5 hours.

The finished product looks and works great! The barrel tumbles with little effort, and mixes anything we add to the it in just a few turns!

The brewing grains we have added to the composter so far have broken down in a matter of days. The bacteria in the compost bin LOVE all the residual sugars in the grains. We've also been adding our trub (sediment and yeast left behind after fermentation) to the composter as well. The yeast and sediment are extremely beneficial to the compost process, and help to break everything down even faster!

Completed Composter!

Grains in the Composter Mix in Perfectly After a Few Turns!

In addition to composting, Leah has taken up baking dog cookies with the spent grains! The grains make a perfect low calorie & high fiber treat for the dogs since most of the carbohydrates from the grains have been removed. When she has perfected her recipe, I'll get her to post it.

Other ideas for recycling grains such as granola, bread, cookies, or tofu burgers can be found from the Seven Bridges Cooperative website. This was the company we purchased our all organic ingrediants from!

All Grain Brewing

Last night Leah and I brewed our first all grain beer! One thing is for certain. All grain brewing is a lot more fun then just brewing extract!! You definitely get a sense of actually creating your beer with all grain rather then just the "beer in a can" method of extract. While both have their pros and cons, I'm happy that we switched.

The Mash

Everything is Ready to Go!

Mashing In

The first step to begin the mash is the heating of the strike & tun preheat water. Instead of trying to preheat the mash tun, add the strike water, and then try to adjust to proper temp, I heated the strike water about 15° warmer then what it should be. The extra heat will then go to preheat the mash tun. Once the strike water has cooled to it's proper temperature (169°), we began the mash in (left). Beersmith, which by far is the most handy tool a brewer could have, calculates my strike temperature for me, by taking into account how much the grain will cool the water to the proper mash temp (154°).

The grain absorbs and cools a large amount of the water in the tun, as we mixed it in. My mash temperature for this recipe is 154°, and the grain cooled my water down to only 156°, so I ended up having to add a bit of cooler water, and then stir it up again to cool it by those last 2 degrees. The mash time for this beer is 60min. The round cooler worked perfectly, and only dropped 1° for the entire mash!

The Sparge

Collecting the First Runnings

After the 60 minute mash is complete, it is time to rinse the grains. The reason you need to rinse the grains is because there are large amounts of residual sugars that are stuck to the grains. If you don't rinse these off, you end up losing them.

The sparge technique we chose is known as "No Mashout, Double Batch Sparge".

From John Palmer's How to Brew, which is the most extensive online resource for home brewers, "Mashout is the term for raising the temperature of the mash to 170°F prior to lautering. This step stops all of the enzyme action (preserving your fermentable sugar profile) and makes the grainbed and wort more fluid." Instead of doing a mashout, we are using hotter then normal sparge water (180°). This will raise our mash temperature and stop our enzyme action, while at the same time saving us a step.

Leah Mixing the Mash/Lauter Tun

A Batch Sparge is a sparge technique where by the brewer will drain all the mash water out of the mash/lauter tun and into the boil kettle. The tun is then filled again with the sparge water, mixed throughly for 5 minutes, then is again drained completely into the kettle. Each time the tun is drained, less and less sugars are being removed, and the runnings are clearer. We will be doing a double batch sparge, which means our tun will batch sparged twice.

Vorlauf

Before each draining of the tun, a brewer will want to do what is called a "Vorlauf". A vorlauf is a fancy German word for recirculating the first few quarts of runnings back into the top of the tun. The grainbed will act as a natural filter when draining the sparge water, however, the first few quarts that exit the tun after mixing will be filled with large amounts of sediment. By collecting this sediment filled wort, and returning it back to the top of the tun, we can use the grainbed to filter this out.

The brewer will need to vorlauf each time the grain bed is disturbed. In our case, we had to do it after collecting the mash water, and then once with each sparge.

Batch Sparging!! (yes I brew barefoot)

There's Something Sexy About a Woman Brewing!

The Boil

Boiling in the Turkey Fryer

Boiling an all grain beer is exactly the same as an extract brew, except for the fact you're boiling a lot more! The burner had a tough time keeping the kettle at a rolling boil with how hard the wind was blowing. We had a preboil volume of 6.5 gallons, and expected a gallon and a half to boil off. However, we only got down to 5.5 gallons. This may leave our beer a little bit weaker then we were expecting. Beersmith had our ABV estimated around 4.8%, however we likely may only reach close to 4.0%. The beer should come out of the primary in a week, so we shall see then.

Just About to Boil!

All Grain

So we've decided to all grain for our next brew! The Earth Day Organic Brown Ale will be our first attempt at an all grain beer. I've just completed my Mash Tun and Hot Liquor Tun. Both were created using 5 gallon igloo drink coolers from Walmart ($21). Eventually I'd like to upgrade these to 10 gallon coolers, but for the next few years, I think I'll keep the batches under 5 gallon, and if I want to do a high gravity brew, I'll just have to use some extract as well.

The New Tuns!

Mash Tun Steel Braid

I will also be purchasing a turkey fryer as my new boil kettle. Ace Hardware online has a great deal on a 30qt Bayou Classic Turkey Fryer . This unfortunately will not be used for turkeys...

Since we will be doing 5 gallon full boils now, we will also need a better method for getting our wort to pitching temp. Here comes the wort chiller!

I still have to look into how I want to sparge though. I can't decide on Fly or Batch sparging, and have to weigh the pros and cons soon.

Everything will be ready by April 22nd!

Prost!

Jeremy