Brew day

Tub with ice to cool water before it goes into the wort chiller.


Original gravity reading, not quite where we expected.


Grain before the mash.



First hop addition. We added 4 ounces of Simcoe in total in the boil. We'll add another 2 ounces in the secondary.


Wort chiller setup. Shows the water from the hose going into the pre-cooler and then into the wort chiller in the brew pot, and then the hose exiting the brew pot with the hot water.


Last hop addition at flame out and before chilling the wort to pitching temperature.


During the boil and just after the first boil over.

Darrell and I started brewing a Simcoe IPA this afternoon at 2pm. It only took us 4 hours this time until we started cleaning up. The pictures above aren't really in chronological order. We started the process by bringing 4.5 gallons of water to 170 degrees to start our mash. I had to add a little water to cool it to the 152 degree mash temperature. We mashed for one hour. That gave me time to run to the store and buy another propane tank to ensure we didn't run out of gas for the brew. This was our second all grain brew, but the first brew outdoors with our new burner.

We brought another 3 gallons of water up to 170 degrees to sparge the mash. This was the second time using the Zapap setup. This has to be where we lost some of our efficiency and didn't hit our original gravity. Lost a little wort due to a spillover. Perhaps we sparged to quickly? Plus, it almost got stuck a couple of times and I had to stir the bottom to get it flowing. Need to get a wooden mash paddle on the next trip to the brew shop.

The boil seemed to take forever. At least after we had our first and only boil over. It put our flame out on the burner. We had a spray bottle on hand to douse the boil overs, but the flame was just a touch to hot evidently. Hops really smelled great with every addition. First hop addition was 30 minutes into the boil and then about every 10 minutes another addition.

I set up a pre-cool tub with 2 gallons of ice to cool the hose before going into the wort chiller. This worked great and cooled the wort 100 degrees in less than 20 minutes. We were ready to pitch the yeast a short time later. Great setup, don't know of anything I'd change for this stage. Used the Zapap to strain the hops out of the wort, into the fermenting bucket.

Pretty good brew session. Only error was the boil over and the lack of efficiency. Both should be corrected in the next session. We'll ferment this for a week and then move it to a secondary carboy to add 2 more ounces of Simcoe to dry hop for some aroma in our final beer. I was really shooting for a Sweetwater IPA clone, but settled for this recipe because of all of the Simcoe hops.