Rogue Brewery Visit

I just spent some time with my wife, Sarah, on the Oregon Coast for our 5th wedding anniversary. Much to my surprise, we were staying in Newport, Oregon. Yes, the SAME Newport that is home to Rogue Breweries!!!

You can swing by my brewery tours page and check out the pictures.

Anyway, we stopped by for lunch and a tour, but the tours didn't start until 4PM, so we just had lunch. Still, it was VERY cool. You have to walk THROUGH the brewery to get to the gift shop and the bar area upstairs, where they have a good pub and some great tastings of the Rogue labels.

You would NEVER know it, driving by, but nestled in the old run-down building on the warf, is a great pub/eatery and some very good brew. The tastings were great. Can't say I particularly liked the chamomellow (made with chamomile flavoring) or the chipotle flavored brew, but Dead Guy is always good, and I really liked the flavor of the Shakespear Stout.

Black Butte Porter - 20 gallon

Well, I just got 92% efficiencies on my Black Butte Porter 20 gallon brew. I'm not sure if it is the concentrated 15 gallon mash (literally overflowing the mash tun as you heat it from 130'F to 155'F and the liquid expands) or if it is the new grain mill and the great crush I'm getting out of it, but the last two brews have been phenomenal on efficiencies.

I did 20 gallons on this, and am keeping 10 gallons. I'm going to try the old standby 1099 in one carboy and experiment with a drier 1318 London Ale III yeast for the other. I've had the 1318 in someone else's, and it was not too bad (certainly different). Oh, and my Moose Drool is almost GONE!

Smells like baking bread

It really adds up when 20 gallons of brew is bubbling away making alcohol. I love the smell of brewers yeast working away on that sweet nectar! I put in two blow off tubes on the most aggressively filled carboys. Looks like the worry over only pitching two 125mL XL Slap packs in 20 gallons is over. Things sure do take off well when you pitch in a well aerated wort. I've noticed my krausens go up significantly and my lag times drop a LOT ever since moving over to using pure O2 to aerate my wort inline on my CFC.

WOOT!!! 87% on 20 gallon mash of Moosedrool!

I just got done with my 20 gallon brew of Moose Drool and I got a whooping 87% efficiency out of my mash. I did 43 lbs of grain in a single mash at about 1.0 qts/lb on my mash, and I was figuring on only about 70% efficiencies. This is the first brew with the new Grain Mill and I was worried that with that much grain, I was going to have low efficiencies and, worse, possibly a stuck mash. I ground the grains all last night, and the crush was a LOT more than I'm use to (even after backing off the crush a lot and gapping the space more than stock). Well, I was worried about all that fine crush, but it turned out SPLENDID. As it was, we had to use 5 carboys to get all 21.5 gallons in. I did all 43 lbs at once in the mash, and then drained the 4.5 gallons of initial runnings (hit 1.113 SG on that) into one of the boil kettles, and then batch sparged about 13 more gallons (in 4.5 gallon increments), then fly sparged the last 6 gallons to hit my 25 gallons preboil volumes. Pumped the wort for a long time between the two boil kettles to equalize the gravities, and hit 1.053 (was shooting for 1.044). Well, boiled for 80 minutes, and ended up with about 21.5 gallons in the kettles at 1.061, for a grand total of 87% efficiency. I didn't stir the mash once after the initial dough in.

Thanks for all the help, Rob! We played cribbage, drank beer, and ate some brauts and chorizos cooked in chocolate oatmeal stout in a crockpot. It was a great time.

Pete's Wicked Ale

Just had my first couple glasses of Pete's Wicked Ale clone I brewed on Dec, 07 of last year. It is VERY tasty. A bit darker (mostly due to clarity) than the commercial version, but very good. Could use just a little more bittering hops, I think. I'm sure I'll brew this one again, but I'll have to see how the Moose Drool I'm planning to brew next turns out.

The Full Suspension is also ready, I'm just waiting for space in the fridge!!! Super Bowl weekend ought to take care of that problems. Grin.

New Keg Fridge

I finally hit the cooling lines on my Woods freezer that I was using as my keggerator while drilling some more holes for 2 more taps. Lost all the coolant and I'm not sure it is going to be fixable. I picked up a used refridgerator today for $75 and spent the day cleaning it, removing shelves, and taking the interior of the door off (so that all 4 kegs will fit in there). Drilled 4 new holes and mounted the splash grills and 4 taps. Got a 4 line manifold put inside on the back wall and plumbed out the back to the C02 tank. Also got a small shelf made for the back kegs (the back of most fridges is sloped, so, you have to build a square stand for the kegs to sit on in the back).







Now I'm just hoping I can find a way to repair my old freezer to use it as a temp controlled fermentation cabinet.

Oh, yeah, and HAPPY NEW YEAR!!!

Wicked Brew

Took the opportunity to invite some of the folks from the local Treasure Valley Brew club over to watch an all grain brew. Jack, Steve, and Cory all made it, and Cory brought some brauts that we crock-potted in some of my oatmeal stout for a couple hours and then ate them on buns with some hot honey mustard...mmmm.

Jason did a double batch. One AG and one extract. He got the extract/steeped batch of Full Suspension going first in the boil kettle and then started the mash tun and HLT cranking up to temp to do an AG clone of Pyramid Snowcap Ale. It was cold and really rained toward the end of the brew day...but any day brewing is a GOOD day!

Temp Controller for HLT Gas installed

I got the temp controller and the ASCO 1/2" solenoid valve installed in the system today. I'll have to do a burner test run and see how hot it gets. Had to rewire a lot of stuff and I removed the mis-matched old ASCO valve in the bypass line of the HLT and replaced it with a matched one and use that one for the gas valve, since it only has a very small 3/16" orifice for flow.

Rye IPA Label

I just got a label for the Rye IPA made up. Going to put it on tap this weekend.

Double Dog Brew Day!

After finishing two separate all grain brews yesterday, a 10 gallon Horsetooth Pale Ale and a 10 gallon repeat of the Fat Tire, I was beat. Jason Hoodenpyle also was over with his brew frame and made 10 gallons of AG Black Butte Porter. So, I ended up with 15 gallons of brew last night (and I racked the Rye IPA to keg and bottled 5 gallons of the B52). So, I didn't have three blow off tubes, and I just picked the brew with the lowest OG and the one that had the most head space and put an air lock on that one...heheh. Well, guess which one took off the fastest? The pictures below are last night on the left and 12 hours later on the right.






Jason also had some great ideas about printing up some labels for our brews to stick on our kegerators under the taps to tell what we had. I came up with the following ones, which I printed out and stuck on some cool business card refrigerator magnets from Walmart.

Blow Out!!

The B-52 and IPA both started bubbling pretty good last night after only 5 hours. I took them out in the garage so that they could get down to around 68'F over night. Got up this morning and found this:





At least they didn't explode. I got them all washed down, and some sterilized blow off tubes put in. I'm very surprised, as I have not had to use blow off tubes since I went to the 6 gallon carboys for primaries. Guess I aerated enough...grin. The picture on the right is after only 15 minutes on the blow off tubes.

Denny Conn's Rye IPA

Jason Hoodenpyle and I got together for another brew. Jason did Skotrat's B-52 Light Ale and I did Denny Conn's Rye IPA (both 10 AG brews).





This was also the virgin run of the new temp controller for the mashtun and HLT using the new solenoids and temp controller. Let me tell you this: it worked like a dream. Set the temp, and just keep the HLT at about 10-20'F hotter than the target temp, and the controller took care of the rest. Uh, that was until the march pump locked up. About half way through the Sac rest of the mash, the magnetic drive impeller jammed. I broke it down (see pictures below) and disassembled the impeller and found a bunch of sticky-goo (technical term) on the impeller shaft. I've decided that this is simply too easy to break down to ignore cleaning, so I'm going to go through it after at least every other brew.

I managed to find enough time during the boil to clean 3 kegs, rack the oatmeal stout to one of the kegs and clean the carboy (in addition to taking the pump impeller apart). The oatmeal stout is tasting pretty chocolaty! And the pear cider tastes like champagne (uh...duh, it is running about 14% alcohol by volume and I used champagne yeast).

New Electronic Temp Controlled Mashtun

Here are the new pictures of my Ranco Electronic Temperature Controlled (ETC) mashtun. I have to thank Walt Fischer from the Homebrew Digest Forum pages for the cool idea. I've been thinking about something like this, but didn't really know where to get the solenoids. Walt's setup convinced me to try to pick up some off Ebay and see what I could do. As an electrical engineer, I had to give it a try..grin.

I got the same ETC that I'm using to control the temperature for my kegs in the keg freezer I got. I also bought some Red Hat 120V AC solenoid valves. Now, the system picks up the temp in the mashtun and bypasses if it is above the set point or sends the wort through the HLT heat transfer coils if it is too cool.

Oatmeal Breakfast Stout

I just finished up the 10 gallon AG brew of Oatmeal Breakfast Stout with the help of Nathan Rowland. Missed my OG again! Hit 62% efficiency and I left a full gallon in the boil kettle because of the willamette whole hops plugging the SS strainer. I'm ordering another false bottom today and I hope I can find some Zymico bazzoka tubes somewhere too. You can also see my awesome little brew buddy, Riley James McClain, who is just over 11 months old now.