Sunday, April 15, 2007

Brew day (from hell): Lenticular Export

So, I really don't have the energy to recap yesterday, so I'm going to post an email I wrote to my buddy Samir a few minutes ago, and that will have to suffice for now:

Yes, yesterday was the day that we moved up to ten gallons.
Everything went smoothly until it was time to chill. I bought a
Shirron plate chiller and this thing called the "wort wizard" (it
basically uses the outflow from the chiller to create a vacuum to suck
wort through the chiller without a pump). I also used a new converted
keg brew kettle. Anyway, LONG story short, it didn't work. I think
the problem was two-fold: trub/hops got stuck in the kettle valve,
which greatly retricted the flow, and then more trub/hops got stuck in
the wort chiller. Eventually we had to re-boil so we could drop in my
old immersion chiller (which actually works pretty well with ten
gallons, at least when it's 40° F outside) and siphoned out with my
siphon starter.

Oh, and to add injury to insult, I managed to get cuts on four
different fingers (and I don't remember ever physically injuring
myself while brewing). Three of those cuts are related to threads on
the wort chiller, and I'm still not sure what caused the fourth one,
though it's the worst... Somehow while trying to backflush the
chiller, my hand slipped, slammed against the concrete, and half of
the skin on my ring finger got peeled back like if you peeled half a
grape. And since it was a cut pretty much parallel to my skin, there
was LOT of bleeding.

Anyway, by the time we got done (9pm, and I was up and getting stuff
put together at 8am), I was too tired to do much cleaning, so I have a
lot of work ahead of me today.

So yeah, that was the brew day from hell. I just hope the beer comes
out okay (sanitation was kind of spotty by the end).

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