The Inaugural Wicked Hops Brew Session

The inaugural Wicked Hops brew session was a success. We all had a great time and many different beers were sampled. Both Jeff and Brandon combined their efforts to brew a 10 gallon batch for the first time and Fred knocked out his first batch of beer!


For the inaugural 10 gallon, Brandon and Jeff attempted a clone of St. Arnold's Brown Ale that would be split into two 5-gallon primaries with different yeasts. Here's the original recipe.. more on that in a bit:

• 18# Domestic 2-Row
• 3# Munich
• 3# Belgian Cara-Munich
• 0.5# Belgian Special B
• 0.125# (2 oz) Chocolate
• 2 oz Perle @ 60m
• 2 oz Cascade @ 15m
• 1 oz Liberty @ 0m
• Wyeast 1056 / White Labs WLP001
• 1.060 OG / 1.016 FG for est. ABV of ~5.8%
  

We used approxmately 7.5 gallons of strike water to mash in a 156*F for one hour. Everything was going well until mashout. Take a look:


I don't know about you - but that's about the most non-brown brown ale I've seen! Something was amiss. Both ProMash and BeerCalculator pegged a decent SRM value.. we definitely should have been darker. Our suspicions were that perhaps BOTH the chocolate and special B were missing, but what to do? Our primary concern wasn't that this wasn't a perfect 10 gallon brew, but that we might make the PERFECT beer and not know what the hell was actually in it!

Alas - we plodded forward. Our target sparge volume was in the neighborhood of 5 gallons at 170*F, and we had to fly-sparge (as best we could) given the volume of saturated grains in the mash tun (approx 7#). We had about 13 gallons of wort collected before boil, and Brandon played bad cop and was serious one (ok the least drunk one) while the rest of us watched him work. :) Good thing though, since we hit target gravity (actual OG of 1.059).

Gracías, Señor Brewmaster:


Racked the wort into two primaries, almost done:


All in all, everyone had a great time. This will be the first of what will be many more 10 gallon brews!

PEACE OUT!