I just finished putting my first keg to rest in the new keezer. This will also be my first successful all-grain batch. Let me backup.
This past November, I set out to produce my first all-grain batch. I came up with a recipe for an English Northern Brown Ale. My first of many problems occured when I purchased my cooler that would become my mash/lauter tun.
The problem was simple. The cooler simply didn’t have enough insulation. It couldn’t maintain a temp to save its life. Over an hour it could lose as much as 14 degrees. This should have been a red flag right away, but I chalked it up to human error and bad instruments.
I pressed on with brew day and soon knew I had a couple of problems. For one, I wasn’t hitting mash temps, no surprise there. Second, my SG readings where appallingly low. Degratatated, as my wife and I like to say, I finished out the day and put the brew into the fermentor, hoping something resembling beer would come out.
I could have done a couple things when I realized I was having some problems. Adding some DME to the boil would have helped beef up the wort and make up for the problems during the mash. However, anyone who has been apart of a brew day, especially one where you are trying something new, will know; it’s easy to lose your head.
I wanted to make sure I monitored the progress of fermentation so I could see where this beer was headed toward. During the birth of my daughter, I had acquired some syringes that had these really long small gauge tubes that connected to them. How I got them is another story and not related, nor interesting. I game up with the genius idea of putting the long tube into the fermentor, keeping it in the second port of my carboy cap. All I had to do was come by, hook up a syringe, take a sample, then take a reading. Seemed like a great idea at the time. Then I saw this.
This was my first time seeing an infection and I was just shocked. I decided to take up the mantra of the modern day homebrewer and relaxed, tried not to worry, and had a homebrew. I decided that I should just bottle it and see what came out the other end. To make an already long story short, it wasn’t good. I ended up dumping the whole thing.
After that disaster, I decided to do a couple of things. The first was replace my cooler. I went with the clear choice by most members on homebrewtalk.com and got a Coleman Xtreme. It has nice thick walls to keep temps steady during mash. I always got a smaller cooler than my previous one so I wouldn’t have a lot of extra headspace where heat could be loss.
I also doubled my efforts with sanitation. I didn’t worry about taking any readings until I was ready to package the beer. I gave the yeast a good four weeks to do what they do and didn’t think about it.
I know have a Pale Ale racked to a keg that is very promising. It is still too early to put a final stamp on it, but all signs point to a solid product. The lost Brown Ale served as a good reminder that I need to slow down and think about what I am doing in all aspects of brewing. From purchasing equipment, performing a mash, or taking readings, there are a lot of areas where one bad decision could cost you a batch. The feeling of dumping an entire batch of beer is something that sticks with you. I don’t intend to relive that experience again.
