mittelschmerz

I don't J really believed me when I told her about six months ago that I was going to name the first beer I brewed in our new home "mittelschmerz". (Look it up if you don't know what it means.) This is halfway between an English strong stock ale and and American strong ale. Get it? Get it?

Alright, it's not that useful or accurate of a name, but that has never stopped me before when naming my beers, so why start now?

The beer was a bit of an experiment: using a lot of dated ingredients, and dialing in my brewing system for the condo, which is close to the smallest space I've ever brewed in. The first condo we lived in in SLC was actually smaller and even more difficult, as the galley kitchen was about 4' by 8', and there was no useful outside space to mash or boil in. I dealt with that by doing countertop partial mashes, and we moved fairly quickly to a better brewing space.

Recipe, with visual aids:

Safale S-04, in a a yeast starter with 1/2 teaspoon yeast energizer, and 1/2 teaspoon DAP yeast nutrient:
I know, I know: you normally wouldn't do a starter using dry yeast. But this yeast is five months old, and came from a suspect source that unfortunately treats their product really badly, and even more unfortunately, is the only brewing supply shop in Atlanta proper. So I wanted to be sure it was in good shape before brewing. For example: they keep the hops at room temperature in clear plastic bags which don't look to have been nitrogen flushed or even sealed well. The $3.80 (!) Safale dry yeast sits warm on the shelf. Boo.

Moving on with the recipe:

15 # British pale malt (Crisp Maris Otter), which dates to 2008 in Anchorage from a source that treats their product much better.

I used the lazy, low-efficiency no-sparge method, so here is 10 gallons of water going into the mashtun to be heated to 161, with a target mash temp of 148:



Here in ATL, we have a nice but smallish balcony, and a newer flat-top stove, so I was hoping to mash on the balcony and then boil on the stove.

Unfortunately, the mash temperature calculator lied to me, and after dough-in, the mash was at 154: As it happens, this is really a better temperature for an English ale: I just like to mash lower for a more fermentable wort.

Here is the lautering:
Which is the lazy step, since all I did was transfer it from the mashtun to the boil kettle. The yield was basically perfect: just over 7 gallons, with a starting specific gravity of 1.053. Everything is amazingly on track!

But then, my hopes for our stove being able to manage a full-volume boil were dashed:
The stove has a front burner with a dual ring that gets hotter than shit (hot enough to flash fry on) so I hoped it would work. But after 40 minutes, the temperature of the wort had only risen from 150*F to 180*F, so the likelihood of being able to maintain a vigorous boil was looking pretty limited. And the building heat was causing weird, scary popping noises where the kettle was contacting the stove, so back to the balcony.

Moving along to the 60 minute boil, which for some reason I didn't bother to take any pictures of.

Hop bill:
1.5 ounces of Warrior, 17.1% AA, at 60 minutes.
1 ounce UK Challenger, 7% AA, at 15 minutes.
(to be dry hopped in secondary with 1 ounce East kent Golding, 4.5%)

And on to cooling the wort to 65*F:
The bizarre sci-fi looking wort chiller is my own cobbled together double chiller: it's two wort chillers tied together to increase surface area. The real application of the double chiller is to drop the first ring in a sink of ice water to make the cooling even more rapid, but I didn't get my shit together in time for this, so it was just a double chiller dropped in the drink.

I rapidly stirred the wort using a wine whip on a portable driver while chilling, which resulted in the wort going from near-boiling to 65*F in about four minutes. Yes, really.

And here it is in the fermenting bucket, with a near perfect final yield of almost exactly five gallons. Significant airlock activity was obvious within a couple hours, and this morning I had to take out the airlock and put sanitized foil over the hole due to super-vigorous fermentation clogging the airlock with hop gunk and trub.

And for those of you who are really, really, really bored, here is a short video of the current airlock activity, which I just replaced:


For a random experiment to dial in a new setup with old and somewhat questionable ingredients, it went amazingly well. Now we'll just have to see how it tastes.