Brewday and Equipment Pictoral

This follows the brewing of a batch of You'll Shoot Your Eye Out Red Rye-der Alt. The recipe started as an experiment in using mostly vienna malt as a base (hence the red). But somewhere along the way it also became a rye experiment (hence the "Rye"-der). I wasn't sure vienna could convert rye, so I added so 2 row to my recipe. Its intended to be a session beer boiled high gravity due to kettle size (34 quarts) and then diluted to 9-10 gallons in 5 and 6.5 gallon carboys.

6 lbs.   Vienna Malt
5 lbs.   British Pale 2 Row
3 lbs.   Rye Malt
1 lb.    Aromatic
.75 lbs. Crystal 40

1 oz.    Spalt Hop Pellets (First Wort Hopping)
1 oz.    Tetnanger (90 minutes)

Third Generation WL001 California Ale (Saved from a Wheat, and then a Porter)

9-10 Gallons.

Hops. My hop plant that just won't quit. planted 2 years ago, After harvesting, I decided it wasn't worth the effort. This little guy decided otherwise. I chopped it back several times last year but he just kept going. I'm going to try and propagate from this one and move it somewhere else in the yard.

Mashing equipment.

Planning for the future, Monster Mash Paddle that should never be to small.

Mash Tun Detail. The Mash Lauter Tun is a converted Coleman cooler with a bottling bucket spigot in the drain plug hole. I originaly created a copper pipe manifold but the diameter (1/4") is too small and clogged with rice hulls the last two times I used it. I will be using stainles steel hose braid for this batch.

Burner and kettle (34qt Seafood Pot)

Equipment Storage.

More Equipment Storage. All my beer making stuff and resulting product (that was not in the fridge waiting to be consumed) used to fit in or on here.

Tap Label Holder. I decided to use velcro to attach various tap labels to my hand made tap handles. This is a strip I attached to the cabinet to store/display them.

Contents of the fridge: Kegs of Lily's Crabrider Lager (lagering), Houdini Hound SFD Wheat, My Ppreciouss Pporter. Various other stuff. (FYI The Coors Light is left over from a party...)

What kind of brewery would it be without an able staff?

Water is heated in the HLT (Hot Liquor Tank). Liquor is the proper term for the wet stuff in the process now, water is what you clean with.

Initial process in all grain brewing is Mashing or Doughing in. Mixing the grains with your initial water. This is then left to sit for an amount of time depending on the temperature of the water. We are using the enzymes in the malted grains to convert the stored starch from the malt into sugar that the yeast will digest and make into beer.

Sparging is the process of rinsing the sugar created by the mashing process from the grains. Here I'm actually getting second runnings from the batch that I'll use to top off the pot as it evaporates.

Next you boil the wort (pronounced "wert", the technical name for beer before fermenting) to extract the flavor from the hops and boil off unwanted parts of the wort. You'll notice the hops on the side of the kettle and ground from a boil-over when I turned the propane burner valve the wrong way.

The wort is then chilled (not shown), using the copper coil and garden hose. The excess water from this is dumped into the pool, to refill and warm it some. Water from this is quite hot at first. The water is then racked by siphon into the fermentation vessels. I am using 6.5 and 5 gallon carboys.

For this batch I am making a larger amount of beer then my kettle will hold so I'm topping off the carboys with bottled water.

The most important part of the process, fermentation. Yeast begins to eat the sugar in the wort and creates alcohol and carbon dioxide in the process. This is the begining of the process

An airlock is used to let CO₂ out and keep airborn contaminants from getting in.

The fermentation is in its high stage.