Adventures in Cold Crashing

Since my last post the weather here had warmed up, the beer had completed fermentation and that could only mean one thing, it was time to keg and have a round of Kolsch. This time I was going to try something a little different, it was called “cold crashing”. Cold crashing is the process of cooling your beer before you bottle or keg it. What this does is it causes yeast particles that are floating in your beer to cool down and “crash” to the bottom of the ferementer. This will allow for clearer bear when taking the beer from the fermenter to the keg since more particles are at the bottom of the fermenter. Now you are probably asking, how do you cool a 7 gallon bucket? Easy, you put it in the fridge.

After two days in the fridge it was time to keg.

After draining the beer into the keg it was pretty apparent that the cold crashing had worked just by the amount of sediment in the bottom of the fermenter. It looks green because of the hops, hops are green.

After filling the keg, it went in the fridge and about a week later it was carbed up and ready to drink.

So how did it taste? At first sip the beer had a very pronounced grain taste (duh, its all grain) but this was something more as if you took a scoop of grain and put it in your mouth. Luckily this has mellowed out since then and now this is great light and crisp beer perfect after mowing the yard or just sitting around with friends. Till the next brew, Prost!

All Grain, No Pain

My beginner’s journey of extract and partial mashing was over and it was time to put on my big boy brewing pants and take a try at all grain brewing. For those unfamiliar with AG (All Grain), it is a brewing process where you extract the sugar directly from the grains (Barley, Rye, etc.). This is different from Extract and Partial Mash because in those brewing techniques the majority of the sugars is extracted from the grain and delivered to you ready to boil and brew. Think of it as Hamburger Helper vs. made from scratch pasta. There is a step up in equipment when it comes to doing AG but this was helped by a brewing friend in McKinney who graciously let me take his Mash Tun, but more on that later.

For my first AG beer I decided to go with a Saint Arnold’s Lawnmower Clone. This is a Kolsch style and with spring approaching it sounded great.

The first part of AG brewing is to extract the sugars from the grains. This is done by letting the grains steep in hot water similar to what happens when you make tea. For this recipe the grains needed to steep for one hour. For that hour you need to keep them at approximately 155 degrees Fahrenheit. The easiest way to do this is take an orange water cooler and let the grains sit in there. This was something I didn’t have but thanks to Chris, he let me have his.

After letting the grains steep you need to drain the mash water. Before you can really let it flow out you have to “Vorlauf”. This lets you take the sediment that is at the bottom of the cooler out and put them onto the top.

After draining the mash water there is still some sugars left on the grains. To remove these you need to “wash” the grains. This is done through a process called Sparging. I prefer to batch sparge, or dump a lot of hot water in. After adding more hot water, vorlaufing and draining it was time to boil.

Due to large amount of water used for AG I made the switch to using a propane burner. Also due to large amount of water was my first experience with a near boil over. Luckily I got the brewpot off just in time.

Don't worry, the green is from the hops

After boiling and cooling the wort, I took my gravity reading. Unfortunately I missed the target OG by a couple of points, nothing too crazy though. I then pitched the yeast and said goodbye to the Kolsch for a couple of weeks.

I was fairly impressed with how simply my first AG batch went. Several lessons were learned but overall it wasn’t too bad. Can’t wait to try this one out!.