Return to Beer and Brewing After Long Absence

I've had a few spare cycles recently, and decided to spend one Sunday morning brewing. This marked the first time in just about a year that I've brewed. This was also only the second all-grain batch of beer I have made, using my ultra-cheap mash tun.

I'll get to my mash tun design in a bit.

I decided to brew a porter, which is one of my favorite styles to both brew and drink. As a base recipe, I used the John Palmer's "Port O' Palmer" recipe (from How to Brew) but modified it just a bit by subsituting some of the base malt (pale ale) with a beech smoked malt. I'm hoping this lends a mild smokey flavor to the beer, but I think the quantity that I used (a half-pound to a 10.25 lb recipe) will be too little to impart much of a difference. But we'll see in a bit.

My brew day started out rough. Since it's been so long since I last brewed, I felt I had to substantially clean all of my equipment before even starting. This took just about a 45 minutes or so. Setting up took a few more minutes, but I was able to multi-task a bit by starting to heat the strike water. I use a generic propane cooker for this.

My mash tun, as you see, is a simple 36 qt Coleman Cooler with a removable manifold made of CPVC pipe. I chose the CPVC pipe over copper for two primary reasons: it's easier to cut using my Dremel, and more importantly, it's a lot cheaper.A 10 foot piece of 3/4 inch copper tubing costs over $20, whereas the same in CPVC costs only about $3. It handles temperatures up to 180 F, and according to some building codes can be used in place of copper for drinking water.

I clamp a length of clear tubing fitted with a pinch valve to this manifold, then run it out through the cooler's drain. No fancy ball valve needed! I estimate the total cost of this manifold to be about $10.

I followed Palmer's suggestion of heating the water to a temperature of 165 F in order to get a strike temperature of 156...unfortunately, I was never able to get the temperature that high--it seemed to stay at about 150 or so. I did heat the mash tun prior to dough-in, but I think next time I will have to heat the water to around 170 or so just to get the mash to the proper temperature.

After the hour, I lautered into my brew pot. Here's where I made another mistake. During the entire brewing process, I had a "helper:" my four year-old daughter. There were some shenanigans and distractions...I sparged the appropriate amount I believe (using the batch sparging method), but I think I may have over sparged: I missed my target gravity substantially. No doubt the lower mash temperature also affected this. Luckily, I had some dry malt extract on hand, and was able to get the starting gravity up close to where I want to be (1.051 vs. 1.054).

So now it's in primary fermentation. It'll prob remain there until after Thankgiving, since I'll be out of town for the holiday.