RF - Beer

[Charley Atchley]

I have been asked if I will post the recipe for the beer I had at Defender
of the Fort.

Sorry no can do.

Its not that the batch was some kind of a top secret or anything. I really
had some screwed up brewing problems and that batch is going to be forever
un-reproducible. In a show of good faith though I will attempt to give a
rough approximation of the process. I want it understood up front though
that I had taken a 3 year break from brewing and some of my equipment had to
be replaced. I decided to up grade the quality of some of the stuff and I
had too much new stuff that I failed to predict the performance of.

Step 1
This beer started out as a wheat stout kind of thing that I have had a lot
of success with.
ingredients:
  5 lbs 120 crystal (crunched)
  5 lbs 2 row pale ale (crunched)
  1/2 lb roasted barley
  3 lbs wheat syrup

  2 oz hautauer
  2 oz sazz
This was brewed a standard triple decoction. Everything went fine until I
got ready to sparge. Right before the sparge I transferred all of the grain
from the Ice chest into the sparger and then I let it set for twenty
minutes. My stainless steel sparger shed heat faster than I was expecting
and the whole thing cooled to the point that it had thickened a little.
(about 150) The new filter allowed me to run the fluid through at a fast
rate and this resulted in the grain bed compacting and clogging. I had to
unload the sparger add hot water and start over again. I then sparged till I
had most of the sugar out, but I now had 11 gallons of wort. It was also
11:30 at night, so I put a lid on the wort and let it set for the rest of
the night. The next day I started the boil down and Everything was going
fine. Gaslec's new fish cooker was boiling up a storm and the level was
slowly dropping in the cook pot. I thought that the line in the cook pot
marked about six gallons. When the boil hit this point  I added the wheat
syrup and the hautauer hops. I let it go for another hour and then added the
sazz hops. After 30 min I started to use my new chiller I had made (out of
1/4 copper tubing) to flash cool the wort, but my new chiller clogged and I
had to run to Lowe's and buy enough stuff to make a chiller out of 3/8 inch
tubing. I left the wort on a very slow boil and drove like a maniac both
ways. When I got back and got ready to cool the wort about an hour had
elapsed. The chiller worked like a charm and the wort went from boiling to
40 degrees while it was running into the carboy. The problem was that I now
had three gallons of THICK wort. (1.152 SPG!!!) I used a "German Alt Bier"
yeast. This fermented rather slowly at first then speed up and bubbled like
mad for a week.

Step 2

 A week later we were brewing a German Alt. I used too much grain in it and
we made too much wort.
  18 lb 2 row pale ale (crunched)
  4 oz hautauer hops
Once again we used a standard triple decoction method and we sparged at 168
degrees until we had about fifteen gallons. We then did the standard boil
down until the specific gravity hit 1.10. We left the hops in for the whole
boil since this was a good old fashion alt beer. When we got through
chilling the wort down and putting it in the carboy we had 7 1/2 gallons of
wort. (We use a six gallon glass primary fermentor) So we added the left
over to a five gallon carboy and then racked the Wheat stout stuff over into
the carboy with the new wort. (We wanted 5 gallons and we had determined
that the Wheat stout had a bit much alcohol and mouth feel.)



I was pleased that the whole mess had a great flavor and it hid the alcohol
well. I was afraid it was going to taste like rocket fuel or it was going to
be too sweet from not fully fermenting.

ATHAULF
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