Mark, Hev and Jack

Heather's sister Heidi and I have been speaking about brewing together for years. She has an appreciation for good beer and is a creative genius in the kitchen (http://www.101cookbooks.com).

Heidi's expanding her portfolio and entering into the world of fermenting sugars rather than just cooking with them. Heidi will help us formulate recipes, adding a touch of creativity to the process. She's also become an "investor" having just splashed out on a 15 Gallon Mash Tun. Sweet.

Here's our first joint venture brew, a (very) slightly modified brew originally created by Byron Burch of the beverage people. We doubled the hops because, well, they were sitting around doing nothing - and we couldn't just copy a recipe verbatim could we?

Brew Journal below. Kinda bland if you don't know brewing. If you are interested and want explanations about stuff let me know.

It's a 5 Gallon all grain brew.

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Grain Bill -

6 lbs. 2 Row Malt
2 lbs. 6 Row Malt
2 lbs. Rye Malt
2 lbs. Rolled Rye

Hops -

1 oz. Spalt Hop Pellets (60 min.)
1 oz. Spalt Hop Pellets (30 min.)

1 #WLP029 German Alt Yeast

Water treatment -

1/2 tsp. Gypsum
1/4 tsp. Calcium Chloride

2 tsp Irish Moss

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Brew Day Stuff -

12 lbs of grain = 13.2 quarts of water for the mash (3.3 Gallons).

We didn't get a high enough mash-in temperature using the cooler, probably because I'd rinsed the mash tun with cold water before putting the water in. Temperature dropped 25 deg. to 140 once grain was in. This will be the last time I use the cooler method.

Added boiling water, slowly, raising the temperature to around 150 after it sat at 140 for 10 minutes.

We had one boil over, nothing too bad.

Cooled wort down using wort chiller to around 70 deg.

OG was 1.063.
FG (two weeks later) was 1.012.

Fermentation started after around 12 hours. Fermetation was at around 69 for the first 2 days. dropped to around 65 for a day, up to 69 again during a hot spell after one week. stayed around 66 to 67 for the rest of the time. 2 week fermentation

Bottle day it smelled kinda musty in the car boy. tasted OK. Bottling took around 3.5 hours.