Schwarzbier

Yesterday was not the best brew day I ever had. I was creating a schwarzbier and was pretty excited about it. I started to mill my grains but my Barley Crusher kept binding up. The roller that spins free was completely stuck. I had to take the whole thing apart, clean it and put it back together. That got me through about 5 more pounds before I had to break it down again.

Well, I got through that, got all my grains crushed and was ready to dough in. I added the grains to the water and was thinking to myself that it looked awfully runny. But I figured Beersmith has always figured mash volumes correctly, so I went with it. After starting the mash I went to double check the volumes and realized that Beersmith had indeed calculated them correctly, but I was reading them off the wrong recipe. D'oh!

I decided to just continue on. I figured there was nothing to be done now. I headed out to grab some breakfast while the grains were mashing and realized my car had been broken into. Fantastic! It took me a good hour or more to get that dealt with (calling police, cancelling a credit card that was stolen, etc) and by the time I got back to the beer, it had been mashing for 2 hours. Oops.

Oh well, I drained the mash tun, sparged and soldiered on. Started the boil, turned my back for a second and had my first ever boil over. yay!

I finally got it finished and into the carboy. Ended up overshooting my target OG by 6 points. 1.059 instead of 1.053. Guess that one will be a little stronger than intended.

Still it had a beautiful color and smelled fantastic. I fed it a healthy slurry of German Bock yeast and hopefully will soon have 5 gallons of delicious beer!