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I wrote recently about creating a new milk stout recipe.  Yesterday was brew day! I was well prepared: I had a recipe I was excited about. I had a beefy amount of yeast cultivated (strong yeast being the key to any successful beer). I had the grains milled, the hops in the fridge, the hardware all sanitized and sterilized. Show time! Until…

It all started off well enough.  Then I made a small but fatal error.  We’ll come back to that in a moment.

The process for brewing beer is pretty simple.  You grind up your malted grains and put them in a large pot.  You steep the crushed grain in hot water for about an hour so that the starches convert to sugar (this is called “mashing”).  You flush the mash out with hot water to rinse all of those sugars and flavor into another pot (this process is called “sparging”).  You boil this sugary liquid, now called “wort”, along with some hops for about an hour.  Then you chill the wort to roughly room temperature and stir in your yeast.  The yeast eats the sugar, then excretes alcohol and carbon dioxide as byproducts (this is “fermentation”).  BOOM! you have beer.

To recap the simple process of brewing beer: mash to sparge to boil to yeast pitch to fermentation.

But simple does not always mean easy.  Losing weight, for example, is simple: eat less, exercise more.  But losing weight is not easy.  Same with brewing beer.  The process is simple, but the details are important and precise.  Mash at too low a temperature and the starch doesn’t convert to sugar; mash at too high a temperature and the enzymatic process stops.  Sparge at too low a temperature and the sugars won’t rinse out of your grains; sparge at too high a temperature and you get harsh, astringent flavors in the beer.  Pitch your yeast in wort that is too cool and your yeast goes dormant; pitch your yeast in wort that is too hot and (best case) get nasty off flavors or (worst case) kill your yeast and get nothing.  The details are precise and the details matter.  Like I said: simple does not mean easy.

Back to my catastrophic error: I got the mash water temp perfect and stirred in my 14 lbs. of malted grain.  Temperature stabilized to a perfect 154°, so I turned off the burner.  Smooth sailing, right?  All I needed to do was wait an hour for the magic to happen.  So I turned turned my attention to the sparge, and I turned on the burner to heat up my sparge water.  Or so I thought.

Turns out I turned the mash burner back on.  12 minutes later something didn’t smell right.  My mash grains were boiling.  Game over.  No recovering from that.  All that was left to do was clean up the mess.

So the levelheaded Mrs. Piehole calmly says to me “I know you’re kicking yourself.  But you’ve got everything else prepped and ready, so run out to the home-brew store and get another round of grains.  You can recover from this.”.  She was right, and that was exactly what I needed to hear to get this brew day back on track.  I love that woman.

Fortunately I live in Chicago.  The kind of big city  you can find pretty much anything you need on any given day.  I drove out to the homebrew store (always open 7 days a week!) and got a refill on my grains.  Sped home and started this simple (but not easy) process all over again.

Second time was a charm.  Beer successfully brewed.  And when I woke this morning the bubbling airlock on top of the fermenter told me that fermentation was well underway.

Sparging the mash into the brewing pot.
Sparging the mash into the brewing pot.

I’m pretty excited with the flavor I ended up with from this new recipe.  In a couple of weeks I’ll let you know how the final product turned out.

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