Impromptu Brew Night

Decided to start a new batch of brew. Mad dash to the home brew store to get ingredients. Making another IPA (a recipe clone for Bridgeport IPA I got from a well known book called "Beer Captured"). For this one I did what they call a "partial mash" which is a kind of mini "all grain" method to allow a little more creativity with the wort rather than just using pure malt extract. Was definitely a lot more time and effort but I'm hoping it pays off in the taste.

The above image is of the mini mash stage. The crushed gain needs to be soaked in a specific ratio of water-to-grain and kept at a specific temperature range for 90 minutes. These are the conditions needed to gets enzymes to convert the grain's starches in to complex sugars that the yeasties can feast on later. After 90 minutes the liquid is drained from the grains and then 175F water is used to rinse (sparging) the remaining sugars out of the grain. The resulting sugar rich liquid is called the wort.

The amount of sugars created from this mini mash is very small. The SG of the 2 gallon wort(after sparging) was only 1.010. This was from 2 lbs of grain. At the end of the process 4.5 lbs of dry malt extract and water are added to bring the total volume up to 5 gallons with an SG of 1.054. If the yeasties do their job then the final SG of the beer should be 1.012 which would mean 5.5% by volume of alcohol.

So now I have three batches brewing and still haven't tasted a drop. It's a kind of torture, me thinks.