last weekend AP and I rolled by CB’s to check out his latest brew session, a rye IPA.

• things have changed a bit since the last time I visited-  CB got the itch and upgraded his brew kettle and burner.
• with his new 20-gallon blichmann boilermaker, he can easily crank out 10-gallon all-grain batches (and can even kick it up to 15 gal. if he can fit enough grain in the mash tun!).

• when I arrived, CB had completed the mash and was starting the sparge.  however, despite the addition of some rice hulls, the mash was pretty stuck due to the rye.

• no worries though – TB had brought over some of his bottled kolsch, so it was time to RDWHAHB.

• once we realized that the sparge was going to take much longer than expected, more than homebrew was called for.

• CB sliced up some of his cured meats and poured out some samples of his saison and another one of his IPAs.  delicious!

• we watched the boil kettle slowly fill, and finally had close to 13 gallons.  when CB’s new burner fired up it sounded like a jet engine and before too long a healthy rolling boil kicked off.

• I had to take off soon thereafter, but from what I heard, a 5 gal. immersion chiller isn’t really up to the task of cooling a 10 gal. batch.
• congrats on the first 10 gal. batch CB!  I can’t wait to give it a taste.

Tags: blichmann, boilermaker, ipa, RDWHAHB, rice hulls, rye IPA, saison, stuck mash

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 28th, 2009 at 9:21 am and is filed under beers, brewing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.