No plan of battle ever survives the first encounter with the enemy...
After six weeks of planning, discussion, argument, and designing, the day had arrived. A bright, glorious Saturday morning dawned, and I was going to make beer. Lots of beer. The biggest damn all-grain batch that I had ever made. And it would be for free. But you want the details...
The Brews Brotherstm, alternatively described as a social club with a drinking problem or a drinking club with a social problem, used to be heavily into the grain business. The club would buy mass quantities of really cool grains for future sale to club members, all back in the days when there wasn't the homebrew retail store infrastructure that there is now. Today, you can't swing a cat without hitting a supply store with the formerly rare Elbonian Pale crystal malt, or the Moldavian Special C malt, but that wasn't always the case. But the popularity of club grains has decreased in the intervening years, and the former club member who was storing the grains was interested in getting his garage back, and thus he encouraged us to get these ^#@~`}|&#! grains outta his house. What to do with all of these really cool beer grains? Well, I hear that malt makes really crappy bird food, and it doesn't stick together well enough to build houses with, so, as leader of this august body, I figured, hell, why not make beer out of it? The crowd rose as one, and kudos and congratulations followed. I'd solved the problem, and the universe was whole again. Now all I had to do was organize the who, what, where, and when, seeing as how the why had already been addressed.
Being a bi-clubbal kind of Emperor, I knew that the Impaling Alerstm, based at Larry's Brewing supply in Kent, had some really cool equipment, suitable for the mass mashing of grains and the release of many BTUs of heat. Being a former officer in that club, I was able to arrange for the use of the facility and equipment at a date agreeable to all. Thus was set my appointment with destiny.
Our goal was to use up a bunch of grain and make a bunch of beer. Towards that end, I figured that a big beer, with lots of specialty grain, was called for. My first step in planning such a beer was to pick a style and research the appropriate literature to help suggest a recipe. I figured a big, foreign style stout would use up a lot of different grains, and so I went to the new Association of Brewers book of beer styles, the one about stouts, and looked at what had been done. My confusion was complete upon discovering that the recipe in that book for foreign style stouts called for a completely insufficient grain bill for the gravities expected. I don't know who proof-read this section of the book by committee, but somebody had slept through this lecture. However I did take the recommended proportions of grains, and expanded the bill to a gravity more suitable for style. We had a plan.
I had arranged to pick up all of the clubs pale ale malt at the February Brews Brothers meeting (a fabulous Louisiana crawdad fest that will go down in history as a prime example of gastronomic debauchery). The quantity of specialty grains suitable for a beer such as had been designed was insufficient, so I got a bit of crystal and a bit of brown. I managed to off-load this collection at Larry's a few days later, and sought out other resources which might be brought to bear on the problems. Yeast was no problem. A batch planned for that weekend had not been made, so there was a gallon of fresh slurry from the Lake Tapps Brewery in Sumner. There were a couple of bricks of hops that had been samples given to Larry from another local brewery. We had plenty of base grains, plus the "cupboard grains" that had been stored at Larry's. These were the results of small grain orders which, for whatever reason, had been refused by the customers for which they had been created. All we had to do was to pick out some of these bags of specialty grains for inclusion into our recipe, and the entire batch would come to us free of charge. Most cool!
The day of destiny had arrived. Larry's opens at 9 am, and I was there, setting the kettle to boil with 20 gallons of water. Steve Luizzo showed up, and I directed him to the grain mill, asking him to grind up three thirty pound bags of the club's Belgian pale ale malt. Other people showed up, and where appropriate, I directed them to help where they could. It was too early for beer (for most of us anyway), so Tom Barnes made up a bunch of excellent coffee, which was most appreciated. The water was warming, and the grain was grinding, and life was good. Then came the first crisis...
The most important lesson that a leader learns is delegation of tasks, but the problem with delegation is that one must be precise and explicit in the instructions that one gives. The grinding crew ambled back to the kettle area with FIVE bags of grain, each holding thirty pounds of pale ale malt. The recipe only allowed for ninety pounds of pale, and the one barrel mash tun couldn't hold all the grain now ground. What to do? Emergency war council ensued, and the decision was made. Parallel beer batches was the solution. Quickly design a beer that filled the two fifteen gallon fermenters available, using sixty pounds of pale ale malt, with some of the cupboard grains, and a brick of Tettnanger hops, along with my supply of homegrown Saaz hops which I had conveniently brought. I set the quickest minds available to the task, and set them to work. I assembled the necessary equipment, and set about planning not one, but two big batches of all grain beer. The adventure had begun...
The next crisis occurred when the proper strike temperature was reached, the grain was added, and the properties of thermodynamics as we understood them flew out the open garage doors. The temperatures within the one-hundred and ten pounds of grains were wildly disparate, and often times the temperature at the center of the tun were lower than the temperature near the outside. Furious paddling would ensue, and equilibrium was finally reached. The problem here was that the temperature was way low. We had targeted 156 degrees F, but had achieved 149. And falling. So our dextrinous mash would become an alcoholic mash. Compromises must be made. Owing to the lower temperature, we decided to mash for a long time. When we made a few attempts to heat the grains, adding hot water until it leaked out the sparge tube welded into the tun, and even pulling a decoction of grain and liquid set to boil and adding it to the tun. However, the sheer thermal mass of the grain doomed our efforts, as we couldn't add enough thermal energy to budge the overall temperature. Ideally, we would have heated the grain and hot liquor to near 170 degrees, but we couldn't even hit 150, so after two and a half hours of mashing and futile attempts to add heat, we decided to begin draining and sparging.
The next crisis occurred when the valves were opened up and nothing happened. I've had stuck mashes before, and they were not pretty, but the concept of a stuck mega-poundage of grain was especially unpleasant. But there we were! What to do? We deep paddled, seeking to loosen up whatever had plugged the bottom screen serving as a false bottom, while adding rice hulls in an attempt to form a better grain bed. The liquor began to flow, but it was dog slow. Over the next couple of hours, we managed to get perhaps forty gallons, but there was plenty of sugar left in the grains. Then came another surprize. The gravity of those forty gallons was near barley-wine strength. Our planned foreign style stout had mutated into an exceedingly dark strong ale. What the heck, it's homebrew, right? So go for it.
Meanwhile, the second batch was well attended. Even though the persons in charge of that batch were unfamiliar with the equipment they were using, the scale made it a lot easier to recover, and the mash-out and sparging proceeded in quick-time. I am indebted to Rob Nelson for the ease in which he handled this difficult assignment, as well for staying out of my way as I manhandled the other batch...
The kettles were fired, and the boiling went well. It is truly a joy to stand in the steam of a malty brew while throwing in a couple of pounds of hops into a boil. The camaraderie of a dozen friends pulling together towards a common goal is truly a special thing. And even though it was truly hard work, I had a great time and plan on doing it all again.
The distribution of the "small" batch into the fifteen gallon fermenters went without much drama, and the immersion chillers were transferred to the big batch's kettle. An hour later, the final crisis manifested itself. It seems that some Emperor type had neglected to install the hop back in the kettle before commencing the boil, with the result that there were a couple of pounds of hops in the bottom of the kettle preventing near fifty gallons of wort from being accessed. Bad Emperor, Bad! No biscuit! But siphonage and pitcherage allowed some fermenters to be filled, allowing the kettle wort level to be such that a strainer could be interposed in front of the drain hole, and the remaining containers were filled as best we could. And a glorious sight it was! A lovely color, with plenty of foaming head frothing out of the carboys as we added a pitcher full of fresh wort. OK, so there was a lot of hop flower added to the containers. Think of it as "wet" hopping. This morning those hops are spread onto the floor in my spare bathroom, having been blown out by the truly vigorous yeast activity. People grabbed their carboys and split, leaving the few, the not so happy few, to clean the equipment as well as the facility. There was a lot of bad karma earned by those who left early, especially those who left without paying for their batch. Those persons will be re-incarnated as chairs for Republican legislators. You know who you are...
Brewing with new equipment is always a challenge, and brewing at this scale is also a challenge, so we were doubley challenged by trying to do both, and then exponentially challenged by doing it twice at the same facility. But it was glorious! And it will happen again. The report was made back to me regarding the quantity of grain that remains in club storage. We're gonna plan one hell of a dunkel weizen, but not soon. Not soon at all...
Copyright 1997 by Richard B. Webb, aka The Outsider.
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This document was placed here on March 11 (my sweetie's birthday!), 1997, and has been viewed countless times since then.