My Brewing Process

1. I start with hot water from the sink, add ½ a campden tablet to the mash water to remove chlorine and chloramines, and then turn on my burner.

2. While the mash water is heating up, I weigh and crush my grains.

3. Once my grain is crushed, I pump the mash water from the hot liquor tank (HLT) up to my cooler mash tun.

4. When all the water is pumped from the HLT, I get a small step stool/ladder out and get up on that to pour the grain into the water while stirring the mash.

5. Let the mash sit for 60 minutes

6. When the mash has about 20 minutes left, I’ll measure out my sparge water, add the other ½ of the campden tablet, and then start heating that in the HLT.

7. Once my sparge water is around 185 degrees, I add enough of it to the mash to give me roughly half my pre-boil volume

   1. I usually don’t pump it at this point.  I just use a pitcher to add a gallon or so to the mash and stir it in.

8. After stirring my mash, I open the valve on my mash tun about ½ way and pull off a couple quarts until there are no chunks of grain coming through.

9. I then start draining into my boil kettle and pour the couple quarts of runoff back into the mash tun

10. Once there is about a gallon or so of wort in the boil kettle, I’ll turn on the burner to start heating it up

11. Once all the wort is drained from the first runnings, I pump the remainder of the sparge water into the mash tun and stir

12. I then follow the same process as Step 8

13. While I’m waiting for the wort to come to a boil, I dump my mash tun and clean it out

14. When the wort comes to a boil, I put the hop strainer bag contraption into the kettle and add my hops

    1. I use this because I don’t want my pellet hops to clog the Bazooka T in the bottom of my boil kettle.  I’ve never had a problem pumping from my kettle using this method.  I can’t even imagine how pissed off I would be if I had 11 gallons of boiled wort that I couldn’t pump through my chiller.

15. When there’s about 15 minutes left in the boil, I start pumping the boiling wort from the boil kettle through the counterflow chiller (without the water running) to sanitize it and then back into the boil kettle.  I also add Irish moss at this point.  I find it necessary to turn up the burner to maintain a boil after you start recirculating through the chiller.

16. Once I’m finished with my 60 minute boil, I turn on the water to the chiller and keep recirculating into the kettle for a few minutes while I sanitize my fermenters.

17. When the fermenters are sanitized, I move the hose that’s recirculating back into the boil kettle to the fermenters and start filling.

18. I control the out flow on the pump to allow for enough contact time with the counterflow chiller to get me to the right temperature.  I find I need to slow this down more in the summer when the ground water is a bit warmer.

19. After I’ve filled both fermenters and pitched my yeast, I clean the boil kettle, and then run hot water through the pump and chiller to clean them up a bit.

Contact Information:  myoung at mikeserve.com