Let's jump in, here's the 3 gallon recipe:
- Grains
- 8 lb Maris Otter (probably 6.5 lb actually used)
- 0.75 lb Crystal 60L
60 minute mash at 152F
- Hop Schedule
- 0.5 oz Magnum for 60 minutes
- 1 oz Centennial at 10 minutes
- 1 oz Centennial at flameout
- 1 oz Chinook at flameout
60 minute boil
- Yeast
- Safale US-05
- Ferment at 68 F
This was done on the stovetop while also grilling out back (mmm deer burgers) in a 6 gallon kettle. The mash went alright except for the fact that I didn't consider that the grain bag wouldn't be large enough to fit all of the grain, let alone wrap around the outside of the kettle. Most of the grain was poured into the bag with ~1 lb left out completely, and another ~0.5 lb sitting above the water line in a sad column of packed grain. Nevertheless I let it ride, seeing that there just wasn't enough room for it all. The temperature only dropped 4 degrees, which I was happy with for some shoddy towel insulation while mashing.
I didn't realize until afterwards that the hop amounts should have been scaled back due to the lack of malt, so the full amounts went into the wort. This brew was also my first trial with irish moss, so hopefully if the beer doesn't taste great it will at least look fine! With the lack of malt and prominent presence of hops in the beer my bet is that this will turn out to be more of a session IPA than anything else. If a session IPA comes out of this I will be thrilled.
After the boil everything was immediately transferred to a sanitized #2 HDPE plastic bucket for the final mistake experiment: no chill wort cooling. As the smell of hot plastic came up from the bucket I got worried that I had actually ruined a half-salvageable beer, but it was too let. Just got to let it ride. The next morning I checked the gravity and, ha %&$#, 1.027. That's dang low. Laughably low. Then I realized I should have at least put a pound of sugar into the wort when I knew not all the grain was going in, but oh well. I transferred the wort to a clean and sanitized carboy before pitching a full dry yeast packet and it has done reasonably well so far. The yeast is doing its thing.
At this point I'm just letting it go and will check it in a week or so. With any luck this beer will have a quick turn around time and be ready to drink soon, just to get some feedback on how far I can mess things up and still get a half drinkable beer. I'm curious to see if anything from this is salvageable, but at any rate it was a hell of a crash course for myself getting into BIAB brewing.
Cheers!
