Saturday, June 18, 2011

Camel Toe

Even without the whole of the automation in place we decided to go ahead and brew from grain.
In all in all it was a good exercise, lots to learn when brewing from grain.
It is indeed in the little details like the mash cycles, and how the grain has to be cracked that you feel that although you are brewing for a year you are still a noob.

We had a guest brewer Bart which has been brewing from grain for quite a while. Thanks to Bart we got some basic tips like the size to which the grain should be milled.
Tuning the size of the grain

Of course our ultra keg which you have seen the birth of in previous posts, does not have a filter fitted in so in order to avoid the grain from clogging the tap, we had to be creative. Bart proposed to used some panties, which did the trick extremely well. From that you will understand the name of the blog post and hence the beer.

Now nylon panties come usually coloured, and you do not want the colouring to end up in your beer so what do you do: you boil them!

Boiling panties, a weird occupation for a bunch of guys.

Until they go to the true colour of Nylon, which none of us knew what it was.
The things you learn when you brew beer.

Nylon is white, who would have thought that
So after that we had the wondrous occupation of stuffing the panties. Sounds dirty I know.
Now you know where the name of the beer comes from
Of course you stuff the panties with the grain and then you have to provide more support. Nylon may be resistant but the last thing you want is the grain all over the place.
So you wrap it in another layer.
Bart, with the improvised grain bag.
Then the mash can begin. 
We used a very simple mash schedule. Which we lifted from here (in Dutch, google translate should do the trick) 

Filling in the keg, sensor and resistance in sight.
We are now ready for the mashing.
Since the power control is not there yet we decided to monitor the temperature in the usual way and switch on and off by hand. Which gives a peculiar temperature curve. Being lazy we decided to over shoot by 5 degrees and letting cool down, all of that whilst steering by hand.

Temperature graph for CamelToe
 It is pretty clear that the we where a bit lax with the temperature bounds of the mashing which we started around 17:00. The time before that was spent boiling the panties.
By 21:00 the boiling was on and we added just a little bit of hops. 

On the boil full hops

And of course you always reach the glorious moment of pouring it into the fermenter.
We had a bit of a mishap with the wort cooler deciding that it would detach the water outlet, so we had to cool overnight. And luckily my laptop only got a few droplets of water on it.

The final pour


You can check the see the recipe on Hopville. Right now the beer is fermenting, and should be bottled tomorrow. It did barf a bit and that is what is expected, at the end of the day, that is what yeast does.

I leave you then with another one of the pictures of the event which describes better the atmosphere of the event.  
Speedy and Bjorn'tje grinding away

Another beer, lets see this one matures.

1 comment:

  1. I congratulate creative brewers and endless innovation possibilities! Nice to see you enjoy not simply brewing but the kinky-ness of it too:)

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