- Joined
- Jun 8, 2014
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I've been brewing, with varying outcomes, for years and I finally decided to build a fermentation chamber and start paying attention to my water profile. I'll be brewing a Green Flash West Coast IPA clone on Saturday, so wish me luck.
I started brewing in 1999 in a two gallon pot in my one bedroom apartment. My first recipe was a forgettable extract recipe from Northern Brewer in Minnesota, before they were "Northern Brewer", that included the following instructions, "Fill the sanitized primary fermenter with three gallons of cold water. Remove the kettle from the sink, and remove the lid from the kettle. Pour the wort into the primary fermenter. If necessary, top up the primary fermenter to five gallons with water." I'm pretty sure that first brew was 1.5 gallons of wort and 3.5 gallons of cold water. I don't even want to talk about the bottling effort that took place in my kitchen 10 days later.
I would brew a few more times in apartments over the years, destroying countless stove burner pans with my boil-overs and making more than a few neighbors run outside looking for clean air in the process.
At some point in the last 18 years I moved to the PNW, bought a turkey fryer, got gifted a 15 gallon kettle, permanently borrowed some Coleman coolers for mashing and sparging, found a Therminator, picked up a temperature controller, and decided to learn more about brewing chemistry.
Armed with my local water company's latest H2O analysis and Brewers Friend's calculators, I'm trying to replicate some great IPAs and IIPas in my garage.
...stay tuned...
I started brewing in 1999 in a two gallon pot in my one bedroom apartment. My first recipe was a forgettable extract recipe from Northern Brewer in Minnesota, before they were "Northern Brewer", that included the following instructions, "Fill the sanitized primary fermenter with three gallons of cold water. Remove the kettle from the sink, and remove the lid from the kettle. Pour the wort into the primary fermenter. If necessary, top up the primary fermenter to five gallons with water." I'm pretty sure that first brew was 1.5 gallons of wort and 3.5 gallons of cold water. I don't even want to talk about the bottling effort that took place in my kitchen 10 days later.
I would brew a few more times in apartments over the years, destroying countless stove burner pans with my boil-overs and making more than a few neighbors run outside looking for clean air in the process.
At some point in the last 18 years I moved to the PNW, bought a turkey fryer, got gifted a 15 gallon kettle, permanently borrowed some Coleman coolers for mashing and sparging, found a Therminator, picked up a temperature controller, and decided to learn more about brewing chemistry.
Armed with my local water company's latest H2O analysis and Brewers Friend's calculators, I'm trying to replicate some great IPAs and IIPas in my garage.
...stay tuned...
