Not the smoothest brewday...

[bwarbiany]

Ugh. Had a bit of a rough one yesterday, due to my own mistakes and some technical hurdles...

1) Mistake:
I was brewing 10 gallons of saison, w/ 20# pils, 4# rye, and 3# table sugar. Target OG 1.069. During sparge I was nearing my normal boil volume (~12.5g), and took a gravity reading: 1.048. Given a 1hr boil-off, losing ~15% volume, that would have given me only 1.056... WAY low.

Some of you can see where I'm going here, but my new disaster-avoidance theory would be to collect more wort and then run a longer boil to concentrate it down. So I did... I collected 15 gallons...

...and then realized I hadn't put in the 3# of sugar, so all my calculations were off.

Increased boil to 1.5 hrs, slightly upped the hops, and since I overshot target volume, I actually was able to pump to the fermenter without pulling as much trub as usual.

Final measured OG: 1.067

2) Technical hurdle:
I usually recirculate wort through the CFC to get it down to ~100 deg F, then pump into the fermenter. Here as we approach the warmer months, and hose water temps are rising, I end up pumping ice water the opposite direction through the CFC in this second step to get it nice and cool for pitching.

I was having some issues with my recirculation pump (for some reason it wasn't creating enough flow to pump it back into the kettle, so I ended up pumping straight to the fermenter while running the ice water through the other way. Temp of wort once I finally finished was 82 deg F. I thought I was closer to mid-70's, so I pitched the yeast, but that means that I pitched FAR warmer than I usually allow. I then put it in the fridge and it was down to 74 deg within 5 hours, and fermentation was already going this morning (it had dropped to ~68 overnight). Now I've got the temp controller set at 73, and will probably allow it to ramp up to 85+ tomorrow. Hopefully since it's a saison yeast, it won't be too bad.

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So, as I said, ugh... The first mistake doesn't bother me as much, since I know that the final wort will end up nice even though it's not exactly what I'd planned in my recipe. The second issue [pitching too hot], though, worries me. I typically am religious about NEVER pitching above 70 deg. Pitching at 82 deg? Ugh...

[maltbarley]

It's a saison, cheers to a warm summer.

[brahn]

It could be worse, ask yeastkiller.

[bwarbiany]

Well, the good news is that I had a pretty short lag (~12 hr) despite only pitching a 1.2L starter into 11 gal of wort. It's chugging along right now very nicely, and was up at 81 degrees today at lunch, should likely be right up in the 85 degree range by the time I get home from work today.

[bwarbiany]

So, after three weeks at 86 degrees, it's sitting at 1.004, and looks/smells/tastes how I'd expect. I'm crash-cooling it as we speak and hope to keg it on Tuesday. I think it turned out okay.