A cautionary tale.

So, I'm going to begin from the end with this batch description. As the picture describes and reads, this Silver Dollar Porter was a bit of a nightmare. My first All-Grain batch of the Apartment Ber series. As I knew, dealing with 10+ pounds of grain was always going to be a problem in my tiny kitchen, with no wiggle room for error and no compost within 10 feet of me.

As described here, All-Grain requires a much more intensive process of both temperature and liquid utilization. In order to get the most out of your malts, you want to boil as much of the sweet wort runnings from the mash-tun as you can. Because I don't have a turkey fryer or a 7 gallon pot...I decided to boil three different pots getting as close to 4-5 gallons as possible. This allows for better hop utilization and longer breakdowns of the sugars produced from the starchy malt. The voluminous boil makes the better beer. This method however made the process stressful, humid and fevered. I hope everyone can taste a little bit of me in each bottle! (Ah the magic of not being bound by state sanitation regulations) The top picture is the primary chilling in an ice bath in the sink using the 'wet t-shirt' method. Because I boiled so much more liquid, the longer it will take to reduce the temp for pitching the yeast. By resting the primary in a cold bath and wrapping a soaked shirt around the top and keeping the waist end in the water, heat is wicked away as the water will always remain colder than the source it is covering.

To operate this process successfully, divide your hops by eye into the number of pots you will be using. You don't want to over-hop one pot versus the other where the malts will be stronger than the hops and weaker in the other. In addition to this, because of the metallic content of the pots used and the surface area of each, they will come to a boil at different times. In my case, i used two timers, one for the smaller pots and the other for the larger. Maintaining your hop schedule is key.

The batch here is a porter, dark in color and slightly lighter in body than a stout but still very dark with higher IBU's. The brewing process itself went off without a hitch despite the increase of scalding hot liquid around me. The original gravity was nailed, the temperatures for mashing were consistent, and the runnings produced just enough to get what should be a 5.5% abv.

The biggest struggle was dealing with the spent grains. Rather than carrying the awkward mash-tun with soaked grains - making it about 50lbs - down the block to the nearest compost bin, I decided to empty it into bags and buckets. I will Never use bags again. Even double bagging didn't stop the wort from leaking all over the place. After thinking the grains were contained, i would turn my back for a second and the runnings would be trailing the baseboards. If i had a resident cow in the spare room, things would be easy. Despite all this, the batch is fermenting away. Increased sediment in the primary is expected due to the husks and grain pieces coming along the way as well as the increased yeast I have been pitching with. If this becomes an issue, most brewers lower the temperature of their fermentation space which knocks down a lot of the yeast so that it doesn't carry over to the secondary or the bottle. Also Irish moss is effective for this, the method I prefer.

I don't believe I will be All-Grain brewing in the Apartment Ber series again, atleast not until I find that cow. A cautionary tale.

*UPDATE* Despite all the tedious work involved in making this beer in such a small space, it took 2nd place at the Brew-It-Yourself competition in June of 2011.