Brews and Blues Beer and Smokin’ Blues

Six Pack Brewery Debut

I fired up the "Six Pack Brewery" yesterday afternoon and brewed one gallon of a Helles Bock.  The video above shows what the fermentation looked like after about 16 hours.  The photo below shows the fermenter blowing off after about 20 hours. 

This experimental one-gallon batch of beer was both a success and a failure.  The success is that I believe I can effectively make one-gallon batches.  The failure is that my volumes and gravities on this first attempt did not fall where I would have liked.  I believe I had two specific problems during this brew. 

#1 - I don't believe my mash produced the full volume I expected.  I don't know for sure because I didn't bother to measure that volume and I should have.  Beersmith calculated that I should have had 1.14 gallons into my boiler.  I believe I had less, but as stated, I'm not sure.  I will be sure of that number next time.

#2 - I believe that I lost a lot more than expected to boil-off evaporation during my one-hour boil cycle.  I had estimated about 10% per hour, which is fairly consistent with what I get on my larger 5-gallon brewing setup.  I'm not exactly sure, once again, because I didn't measure volumes at each step, and I WILL next time around. 

At any rate, I expected to get approximately 1 gallon in my fermenter at 1.071 gravity.  I ended up with about 2.5 quarts at 1.090 gravity.  I added some top off water, and added too much, so my gravity at nearly 1 gallon turned out to be 1.054. 

I'm going to make this exact same recipe again and make some adjustments in my volumes and techniques to see if I can hit everything right on target with my next attempt...