Vic Secret IPA kegging and coffee grinder ipa brew day

11/15/15:

Vic secret ipa:
Brewed 11/1
Kegged 11/15

OG 1.062
FG 1.018

I opened the vic secret fermenter for the first time today, in the hopes that leaving the beer alone until kegging day will reduce exposure to oxygen and wild yeast or bacteria. I checked the gravity and tasted the beer. Golden, good clarity. Kind of a tartness, lemony. Slightly viscous, either from the relatively high final gravity or from the pound and a half of flaked oats, or both.

As for brew day, I bought a 55 lb sack of unmilled German pale ale (avangard) the other day, for $46. I don't own a mill, but figured it might be fun to play around with nonetheless. So I set to work on grinding -- grinding, not crushing -- the grain. I might have just created flour, at least initially. But toward the end, the resulting crushed/ground grain was looking much more usable. The lesson here? I'm not sure the extra time spent weighing and crushing grain is worth a few dollars saved per batch. And I'm using a coffee grinder, which really increases the amount of time necessary to crush the grain. Could I do better with an actual grain crusher, both in the quality of the crush and the amount of time spent? Maybe. But then I'd have to spend a decent amount of money on a crusher, and I may not save any time or that much money, if I then have to also purchase a drill.

The other thing that remains to be seen is how this mash will lauter. I added five pounds of grain that I crushed, along with five pounds that the homebrew shop crushed. If it's a really sticky, slow lauter, then I'll know why. But it also has a pound of ground flaked oats, so it might be hard to say for sure. The mash did not clog, thankfully, but the lauter was very slow. Another trade-off to add to the list of issues with crushing my own grains. Or maybe it was just the pound of oats?

Coffee Grinder IPA came in at 1.054. Anticipated OG was 1.065. But final volume was at least 5.5 gallons, maybe even 5.75. Toward the end, the boil became much less vigorous; I think because the propane is getting low. Either way, the OG is still disappointing, as I'm looking to drink some higher alcohol beers, but I keep brewing thinner beers. In the end, it will still be beer though, and I'm sure it will taste just fine.

Coffee Grinder is a blend of citra and galaxy. And Willamette. I'm not a huge fan of noble-like hops, but they're so mellow that they'll probably be overtaken by the more aromatic citra and galaxy. But that's ok. Hopefully they'll add something. I needed to use them. They'd been in my freezer for about a year, and since this has been the year of brewing IPAs -- and not a more hop-neutral style -- they've remained unused.

On another note, these brew-and-keg days really leave my kitchen a mess, and me feeling tired. On yet another note, pitching onto a previous beer's yeast cake is an extremely effective way to produce a quick, strong fermentation. The airlock was already bubbling away a mere twenty minutes after racking the wort onto the vic secret ipa's yeast cake.