One way to royally stuff up a brew.

Yeah - it's been a while since I wrote one of these. I hate typing mostly... that's why. But I had a real serious incident during my brew today. You see - I had mashed in as usual. I mashed for around half an hour before I decided to start recirculating. I had already started collecting and heating my sparge water...

Then the power went off.

So instead of panicking, I decided to sprint around the house in my underwear saying this like "Un-fucking-believable"... "Fucking typical"... "Should've brewed yesterday"... etc.

But these verbal indiscressions whilst on foot weren't in vain. I had carried my HLT over to the front patio, so as to heat the water inside with the side burner on my BBQ. I tried to fire her up - but I guess the 40 knott gusts were too strong to maintain the flame. I decided to carry the BBQ off the patio into the carport - no mean feat on a good day... let alone in my undies in the torrential rain. I asked Christina to help, but she was waaaaaaay to pregnant to lend any real help.

Anyhow - the trip to the carport was a success. Aftermoving my car out of the way, I managed to get the sparge water up to 72 degrees. All this whilst running of into my kettle too.

So - seeing as how the sparge water was so cold, I decided to invent a new sparging technique. I call this the bulk fly sparge...

Once the mash was exposed, I carefully poured the entire contents of the HLT into the mash tun, put the lid on, wrapped it in a blanket. The theory here is that my HLT isn't insulated, but the mash tun is. So the cool sparge water would stay warmer in the MLT than in the HLT.

It worked.

Then I realised I couldn't boil my wort in my kettle. Lucky I had a few of those 47 Liter pots in stock!

I transfered from my electric kettle into a valveless pot. I pulled the grill and hot plate off the BBQ and sat the pot on one of the burners. The pot took the space of 3 burners and within an hour - it was boiling. The boil was more vigorous than whet I normally get so instead of the expected 1.052 I got 1.060. Also - I will need to add the recovered wort into the fermenter as I only managed to get 18 Liters into it. much less than the 21 I normally collect.

Once I finished the boil, I carried the pot back inside and hooked the chiller up the normal way. I couldn't whirlpool the way I normally do, but I used my paint stirrer on the cordless drill instead. Worked a treat.

The wort was hella clear - so it looks like I learned that a vigorous boil helps in aiding wort clarity.

All's well that ends well.