Aqua Vitae

Ingredients:

Prep: Boiled 2 gallons of water and left in fridge overnight. Had to crush the chocolate malt and roasted barley. Sanitized carboy, 2 6 gallon buckets, and various brewing equipment.

Mash: Heated 5 quarts water to 165 degrees and added the various grains. Steeped the grains at ~150 for 90 minutes. Strained off the initial runnings for ~1 minute until they were pretty clear, and then recirculated them into the mash. Then proceeded to drain the mash water. Meanwhile, heated 5 quarts of water to 165 degrees and after draining all of the mash water added this to the mash pot with the grains. Let this sit for 15 minutes and then drained off all of the runnings. Resulted in 2.25 gallons of wort.

Pre-boil: Added 2 quarts of water to the wort to bring it up to 2.5 gallons. Brought this to a boil and then removed it from the heat. Added the dry malt extract and then took a gravity reading. The corrected gravity was 1.102 (24.18 Plato) for the 2.5 gallons, which worked out to a perfect gravity at this point. Target gravity is 1.049-1.051 for 5 gallons, and this works out to a projected target gravity of 1.051.
This indicates that I obtained a very good efficiency from the mash. There were 127.9 potential gravity units in the mash, and I extracted 97.5 of them. A 76% mash efficiency. I’m definitely pleasantly surprised by that.

Boiling the wort: After taking the gravity reading I added the hops and put the wort back over the heat to bring it to a boil. This took about 15 minutes, shortly thereafter the big head of foam died down and the boil was well underway.

Cooling & Pitching: 15 minutes before the end of the boil, I submerged the chiller in the wort to sanitize it. When the boil finished I submerged the wort pot in an ice water bath and began running water through the chiller. It took about 12 minutes to cool the wort to 75 degrees. Then I transferred the wort to a 6 gallon plastic bucket and added chilled water to bring the total volume to 5 gallons. The specific gravity measured 1.051 (12.62 Plato), exactly on target.

I had “smacked” the Wyeast packet about 3 hours earlier and it was well puffed up by now. After aerating the wort by pouring it back and forth between two 6-gallon buckets a number of times, I poured it through a filter into the carboy. I then poured the yeast into the carboy, capped it with the stopper and airlock, and shook it vigorously for about a minute to make sure the yeast was well incorporated.

At this point the wort was at 62 degrees - nerve-wracking for a cold house in winter.

Fermentation - Primary: There was clearly activity in the carboy the first morning after brewing, about 12 hours after pitching - a layer of foam had formed overnight. When I next checked the wort, 20 hours after pitching, there was a constant stream of bubbles in the airlock and a 2-inch layer of foam on top of the wort.

Fermentation continued steadily at a quick rate for a couple of days and then began to wind down. After 4 days there was next to no activity in the airlock and the kraeusen had subsided. A thick layer of trub had settled on the bottom.

Fermentation - Secondary: I transferred the beer to the secondary fermenter at this point, a 5 gallon glass carboy. The beer was pretty clear during the transfer, and using a carboy cap helped a lot, such that almost none of the trub got caught up in the siphon during the transfer.

No further activity started up after the transfer, which seems right. The gravity after primary was 1.016, a bit over the predicted final gravity of 1.010-1.013. So any fermentation should be pretty quiet. The beer looked very clear after transferring and settling.