Brewing Triple Chocolate #3

Going back to my roots. Trying recipe #3 again, and right out of the gate I messed up the recipe. The Brew Store gave me some roasted barley when I asked for wheat. Shouldn't be too bad of a substitution though. I did manage to find the same hops and yeast.   

Starting with 4 gallons of water to mash my 15lbs of grain. Now that I have Uncle Jim's 10 gallon mash tun, I can also use 4 gallons of rinse water. Should end with 6 gallons in the primary fermenter. 

This is always my favorite part, adding the grain to to water. It smells like baking bread. I added another gallon because the mash was too pasty. 

This is how it should look; soupy. Now I get to wait a hour or so. 

My other supplies. Amarillo and Galena hops and U.S.-05 ale yeast. Need some nice bold hops to balance the 3 layers of chocolatety goodness.

Wort is streaming out blacker than molasses. This is going to be one thick brew. The pitcher is used to send the first running back to the tun in order to filter out the bits that make it past the false bottom strainer. 

Next, I will run another 3 to 4 gallons of rinse water trough in order to catch all the wort that is stuck in the draft, or spent grain. 

The boiling pot looks like it will be filled to the top of the  stamped side label. When the boil is complete, the level will be at the bottom of the label. 

Boil for 90 minutes while adding a fraction of hops every 20 minutes. Usually I put the stronger hops in first and  the milder ones toward the end. 

Next, I'll use the wort chiller to drop the temperature low enough so that I can transfer the wort to a plastic carboy. 

Sanitizing the primary fermenter. While the hop acid will take care of some of the bacteria, I use Star San as an extra precaution. 

Pitched yeast at 10:30. Total brew time 6.5 hrs including dinner and catching the end of a silly movie Lee put on. 

24 hrs later and a nice cap has developed on top. The CO2 bubbles float the hop leaves to the top. The aroma coming out of the bubbler is floral with a hint citrus. 

Now I can wait a week is so, after the cap settles down, indicating a slowdown in fermentation.  This is when the beer is transferred to the secondary fermenter. The hops and trub are removed and the yeast continues the convert the more complex sugars, but at a slower rate. 

Update:

8 days later, transfer to secondary fermenter. 

Doing a rinse so I can recover all the beer trapped in the trub. 

When my conical fermentor arrives, I will transfer the beer to it so I can run the sediments that made it through my transfer. Because my conical fermentor is on the way, I poured from the primary instead of siphoning. 

All Good Things Must End

Gone are those stereo components that we clung to for so many decades. Like the explorer in Windows XP, like regular gas without ethanol, like taxation with representation, all these things are broken, never to return. 

Here are our components that have just plain worn out. On top is our JVC A-X40 power amp, in the middle the JVC T-X55 tuner, and on bottom the Denon DCD- 610 CD player. The CD is the second one after my Pioneer died. Forget about the tape players, went through 3 of those. Will replace the CD when I can find a single drawer unit. 

Anyway, here is our new Onkyo TX-8020 power amp with built in tuner. above that is our Technics SL-5200 direct drive turn table. This was given to me by a friend. It replaced his little brother SL-B2. I must have changed the belt around four times. Glad to be rid of the belt drive. Did it have to by black? They don't offer silver anymore. 

The driving force for replacement of the JVC was the plated contacts were all corroded and so the turn table wouldn't deliver clean sound without fussing with the EQ selector buttons. 

Let's see how well the Onkyo holds up. Vinyl is all the rage, so I had to do it. 

Now, all I need to do is string the FM antenna, and maybe connect the TV. The Black wire to the right of the turn table is for connecting aux devices like phones, computers etc, so that's covered.