Salvagebeer Homebrew Beer Blog

So, I brewed gear experiment batch #1 this past weekend, and things went much as expected. The brewing was done in a zapap, bucket-in-bucket mash/lauter tun, and the resulting brew was slightly less than the 5 gallons that I was looking for. I used the experiment recipe to the letter, and brewed at Jól’s house, with his lovely lady-friend and a couple of riff-raff hangers on.

The day was brisk and overcast, and we did much of the brewing outdoors. Our blood has yet to thicken up for the coming onset of winter, so the day was spent running in and out of the house to check on the progress, while drinking a mix pack from Wolaver’s, an organic Vermont brewing company associated with Otter Creek.

This is one complaint I have about my keggerator – all of my beer goes into the kegs, and I can’t be bothered to bottle homebrew for bringing along for such adventures, so we drink commercial beer when I brew away from home. I chose the Wolaver’s mix pack as it included a brown ale and TWO pale ales (and IPA and a standard pale). I was hoping that they would add to the brewing mojo of the day, given the recipe we were brewing.

Adding the grains to the zapap, I realized, I think, for the first time, what I was getting myself into. I’d really only used a zapap once or twice before, and I’d fly-sparged both times, using the crude but effective pie-plate technique to disperse the sparge water over the grains.

We started the mash with 5 gallons or so of strike water, heated to 173 degrees as per the original recipe, and dialed in the mash to the target temperature of 154 degrees with no further noodling. Good formula.As a quick side note, remember to pull out the top bucket and fill up the air space in the bottom bucket with your mash water before adding water directly to the grain. Failure to do so will result in a whole lot of bubbling as the water passes down into that space, and will significantly slow down the rate at which you can add your water. I DID remember to do this, but apparently not quite enough, so I got some of the trademark bubbling, which I recorded in the video below for visual thinkers.

An immediate problem was that it was difficult to stir the grain well, given my lack of a mash-paddle. I did the best I could with a long plastic spoon, but it was pretty bendy, and I ended up with pockets of warmer or cooler grain that persisted almost until the end of the mash.Temperature is a point of major concern with the zapap setup. To this end, I dutifully checked the mash temperature every 15 minutes for the full 60 minutes.Over the hour, I saw a drop of 3 or 4 degrees, overall, and this includes any overall settling of temperature due to the hot and cold pockets equalizing (which they didn’t completely do until 45 minutes had passed). To my mind, this isn’t significant enough to abandon the setup. Sure, it may effect the end result, but how much isn’t entirely clear, and it certainly won’t cause you to make a lesser quality beer, overall. I may be proven wrong by the competition judges and taste-tests, but I just don’t see temperature retention as a major issue when you’re dealing with an hour or less for your mash and enough porridge to make a 5-gallon batch. That’s a fair bit of thermal mass, considering the grain and water alone.

Every brew day has a snafu, almost without exception. Mine was exploring the concept of batch-sparging and my chronic inability to think or reason in any way. Let’s see if you can get there before me. If I had 9.4 gallons of total sparge water, and used 5 gallons for the initial mash, that leaves 4.4 gallons of remaining water for the “sparge” portion, right? When I added the water for the sparge, the bucket was filled nearly to the top. Look back at my calculations in the original recipe, and see if you can see where I screwed the pooch. Got it? I’m sure you do, as you’re undoubtedly a much brighter bulb than I am, but just in case, here’s what happened:

The dry grain, plus 5 gallons of hot water filled my zapap to capacity – remember, zapap capacity is the top of the BOTTOM bucket, not the top one. 11.5 pounds of grain can be expected to absorb about 2.4 gallons of water. This water effectively STAYS in the zapap after you drain the water, so when I add the 4.4 gallons of sparge water, even though it’s less water than I used for my mash, I’ve effectively got 6.8 gallons of water in the zapap, plus the grains. As 5 gallons initially filled the zapap to capacity, I found myself nearly two gallons over, and water began spilling out from the space between the buckets. I turned, pushed, lifted, and screamed, and then just gave up and let it go. This is why I was a bit under my target in terms of finished wort. How could I have avoided this? I could fly-sparge, as I will be doing this weekend, or I could do a DOUBLE batch-sparge, adding about 2 ¼ gallons each time. Either would work fine, and would give me the right amount of wort without the mess.

After draining the water from the mash, I left the sparge water to soak for 20 minutes, drained it to the kettle, too, and put the whole works on to boil.

Folks just getting into brewing may not have access to an outdoor burner. I’ve done full-volume boils like this on my stove-top. Just separate your wort into several pots and boil separately. For best hops utilization, you’ll want to sort your hops proportionally to the volume of wort in each vessel.I boiled and hops according to the original recipe, and we used my immersion wort chiller to cool it down. Look at the fun!

Because I brewed this batch away from home, and wanted to transport it, I opted to ferment in steel instead of glass. I’ve read some terrifying articles about folks getting badly hurt on broken carboys. While I still use carboys, I’m pretty careful with them, and would never want to transport a full one in my car. A corny keg makes a great fermenter, and I used one for this brew. Soon, I’ll post some really neat keg-as-fermenter tricks that will make you never want to see a carboy again.I’ll ferment this batch in primary for a week, rack to secondary for a week, and then keg-condition for about a month or so. This batch will keg condition longer than others, as it’s the first batch of the series.
Efficiency-wise, this setup was a bit poor, as expected, and I ended up with an OG of 1.048, well below the target OG of 1.055. This weekend, I’ll fly-sparge in the zapap, and expect to see an noticeable improvement in extraction.