Lost Cow Brown Ale

Today is a random brew day.  I didn't really have a recipe in mind, I just picked out what ever grains looked good and then whatever fresh whole hops were available.  I already had a yeast starter going for a few days with an american ale yeast.  I decided to go real heavy on Briess' Special Roast Malt.  Which I later found out has a very biscuty or toasty quality.  I chose some low alpha hops as well to go with the darker nuttier flavor of the grains.  It turns out I pretty much picked the exact profile of an American Brown Ale.  I literally just wondered around the grain room till I found what I wanted, hence, Lost Cow Brown Ale.

Grain Bill

Briess - 2 Row Brewers Malt Grain 10.000 lb

Briess - Special Roast Malt Grain  1.500 lb

Briess - Caramel Malt 120L Grain  1.500 lb

Hop Schedule (100% whole leaf hops)

US Golding  1 oz (90 min)

German Hallertau  1 oz (90 min)

German Hallertau 0.5 oz (15 min)

German Hallertau 0.5 oz (0 min)

Yeast (2 liter starter)

Safale S-05 11g

Mash Schedule

Conversion - 5 gallons at 150F for 60 min

Batch Sparge - 3.5 gallons at 165F for 15 minutes

Getting those yeasts all good and healthy.  So recently I've been realizing that I am having a huge issue with thermometers.  I need to go get a lab grade thermometer so I can calibrate all the other thermometers I have.  Which means, my mash was sitting for an hour somewhere between 156F and 148F.  Which is basically the entire range for which you can mash.  Most of the thermometers tended to read towards the lower end of that spectrum so hopefully I will get a nice dry beer.

Also, I got some Iodine to do a starch test. Where you use a dropper to drop some iodine into the wort and check the color.  If you see a nice light brown or light red, you have good starch to sugar conversion.  If the color stays real dark, the mash needs to rest longer to convert all the proteins.  The only issue is that this tincture I got doesn't have a dropper and I am pretty sure it is 100% iodine and so its really difficult to tell the color change.  Fairly positive I should have got an iodine solution that is less iodine. Next time.

Not much vorlauf needed, the gain bed settled quickly to produce a really nice filter.

First conversion I got 3.25 gallons. It's time for sparging.  After dumping my 3.5 gallons at 190F the mash looked liked it evened out at 167F.  Some places 169F.  Hopefully not much higher, otherwise I will extract tannins.  I must have done my water calculations wrong because I got just a touch under 7 gallons, at 1.046 SP.  I'm going to do a 90 minute boil to bring the volume down and the gravity up.

My efficiency is somewhere around 70%, which is on the lower end of typical.  Time for the first addition of 1 ounce US Golding and 1 ounce German Hallertau, all whole leaf hops.  I put them in my hop bag because I forgot my stainless strainer at the bottom of the kettle.

After 90 minutes there's just one last hops addition for aroma.  All in all the I ended up getting a quart more than 5 gallons of beer into the fermenter at an OG of 1.058.  Not bad.

Cydne helped by pitching the yeast. And the yeast starter really improved the lag time of yeast activity.  Less than 12 hours later the krausen was already up to the bung.

The beer should hopefully come in around 5.8% and fill approx 55 bottles.