I’ll call this batch 8.1. Brew Day was 2010-07-07
After the disastrous outcome of the previous attempt at brewing this Blue Moon clone recipe, I went back to John Palmer’s How To Brew to see if I could figure out where I’d gone wrong.
One of the things that I picked up was that the protein rest (that I’d recollected was so important for mashes with a high percentage of wheat and unmalted grain in the bill) actually doesn’t do much to avoid stuck sparges, as I’d thought. Either I read it wrong the first time or I’d made it up in my head. Turns out there’s a Beta Glucanase rest that is supposed to prevent gumminess. I decided for the second attempt that I’d include this Beta Glucanase rest. Also, I added 1 lb of rice hulls for some drainage.
My Beta Glucanase rest was to be 110*F for 20 min, Protease rest 122*F for 20 min, and finally the main event at 154*F for 30 min.
I came out a little hot for the Beta Glucanase at 118, hit my temp for the Protease rest pretty well, and did pretty well on the saccharification rest.
The thing is, I had to do all of this in a 5 gal rubbermaid drink cooler, which doesn’t leave much room for water when you’ve got 11 lbs of grain. Also, since i’m doing infusion mashing, and wanted three different temperatures, my first rest was super stiff at 8 qts water to 11 lbs grain (so that i could add water to hit my second and third rests).
After all that work, the sparge was still slow as hell (90 minutes to collect 4.5 gal). I started brewing after work (always a dumb idea), and I didn’t pitch the yeast until 2:30 AM. I was a tired, grumpy dude, but I wasn’t about to give up on a second shot at this.
The first taste on the way into the primary fermenter had a sharply bitter finish, maybe from the bitter orange peel. I hoped it would mellow out.
When i racked to secondary on 7-19, the bitterness may have eased a bit. It also seemed a bit estery, probably due to the warm temps we’ve been having. My fermentation temp had been 78-80 *F, pretty damn high.