Total zen brewing today! Not sure if it's cool to have a sentence about zen end in an exclamation mark... but whatevs...
Brewed my witbier (again) but changed up the recipe a little... Because of the low efficiency I usually get with this recipe, I increased both the barley (belgian pilsner) and the wheat (malted) by a pound each and kept the unmalted wheat the same (one pound)... glad I upped the grain bill bc, as you'll see, I got low efficiency (surprise, surprise) again...
Also, instead of using the brewstore's dried bitter orange peel, I zested two oranges and four limes and ended up with a little over an ounce of fresh citrus zest. I backed off of the spice bc I wanted the focus to be the fresh citrus... blah blah blah (amirite?)
For the mash, I hit two degrees lower than I planned (152 instead of 154) but I let it ride... After a half hour temp had dropped to 149, so I boiled up two cups-ish of water and added to the mash, which brought it back to 152. I think I might be ready to try decoction mashing... I'm tired of struggling with this recipe, and decoction might be the way to do it right. Decoction, in a nutshell, would let me step the mash at different temps. For example... I could mash in at 130, let it sit, then remove a measured amount of the mash, heat to boiling and return to the mash tun. This would raise the temp of the whole mash to my next step (150ish)... I've been intimidated by moving on to this next step, but I'm getting so frustrated that I'm ready to say F-it and go for it...
So I held 152 for an hour, I even let it go longer bc I was so totally chill... mash out, sparge twice.. and my kettle was...
...this full! Total boilover waiting to happen. I took some back out and held aside to add to the boil after some had boiled off. Not ideal, but it was a 90 minute boil, so I was thinking whatevs... I boiled for the first 30 minutes and right before I was going to add my bittering hops, I ran out of propane (wah, wah...) really was good timing though, I ran to hardware store for a quick fill up and was back to boiling in less than 15 minutes.
all my late spice additions: citrus zest, corriander, and aroma hops
While brewing, drinking my Rye Saison... omg... so good. Also... omg... total danger zone. I had two at lunch time (forgot to eat again, oops) and was total accidental buzzed. One more would have probs been disaster...
Aaaaanyway... finished the boil, chilled, and took gravity reading... 5.5 gallons @ 1.050 which means 65%-ish efficiency. Not disaster, but not great either... Also, when pouring into the fermentor, holy citrus aroma! I might have overdone the zesting... (there's a total corny pun in there somewhere, but I'm too tired to pull it out)
After brewing, I filled my new growler (that I picked up as a souvenir on my first trip to NYC last week) with my Rye Saison to bring to a cookout. I felt like a total pimp walking in with this badass growler full of homebrewed beer... Total great reception, all the guys (I didn't really know any of them) surrounded me and wanted to try my beer, then after trying, all telling me how great it was... One guy starts telling me he is in the wine business, and if I ever want to get real...
sigh...
That would be nice... total pipedreaming now... quit my job, brew everyday... totally have someone else do all the legwork, just hideaway in my own brewery and zen 100%... sigh again...
But that's it for tonight... airlock is already bubbling on the wit... and I gotta go to work in the morning... Later.
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