Brews and Blues Beer and Smokin’ Blues

Brew Day – 6/27/2009

I got off to a good start today. I got all my gear out and set up by 11am. I wanted to give myself plenty of time since I was trying out the new techniques (new to me) of all-grain brewing. It was also quite hot today, so I actually broke a sweat before the noon hour... The above photo shows my brew kettle and burner, my mash tun, and my immersion chiller soaking in a bucket of water...

Today's beer had a 14.2 pound grain bill, so it took quite a while to crank all of it through the Barley Crusher...

Tonya and I finally got all the grains crushed and into the mash tun with the strike water. Since this was my first attempt at this, I heated the strike water a few degrees higher than I actually needed to make sure I didn't undershoot the temperature. In the above photo, I'm letting the mash settle down to about 156 degrees before closing it up...

I fashioned this handy-dandy insulation block to fill the dead space in my mash tun during the mash process. It worked extremely well. The mash lost less than 1 degree during the hour process...

This photo shows the first runnings coming out of the mash tun.

Pretzels with mustard go great with beer :)

I finally got the boil going and added my first round of hops. This is when things really start to smell good...

A nice rolling boil... at this point, it doesn't require much attention except for the occasional addition of hops and irish moss...

When someone gives you a growler of Rogue's Dead Guy, cherish the moment! I sorta quit taking photos at this point in the day ;)

The beer is in the primary fermenter and will be for 14 days. I'll rack it to a secondary and leave it there for 2-3 weeks before bottling it...