Last night I decided to light up the strike water at 9pm, which was crazy, but I wanted to do it anyway. A 10 gallon batch of porter, modified from the San Fran recipe slightly, more in the robust family of porters, but with similar traits.
After my previous experience straining my mash using a kitchen strainer, I decided to build a lauter tun.
At first I had planned to buy a large cooler and either use a braided steel hose or make a CPVC manifold to strain the mash through, but I suddenly remembered reading about making a system using 5 Gallon buckets.
I flipped through my books, and found information about the Zapap lauter tun system described by Charlie Papazian in the Joy of Homebrewing.
It looked easy to make, and I didn’t even have to use large hoses or drill the drains on the sides as I was planning to use some extra buckets that I had leftover from my days of fermenting in my True Brew buckets. I decided that I would give this “free” solution a shot.
Drilling the bazillion holes in the bottom of the inner bucket turned out to be annoying, but it was over and done with in under an hour (which happened to be while I was mashing anyway).
I set up the buckets as shown in the photo, and away we went. I pulled through some liquid until it clarified (called the vorlauf process), slowed down the flow, and dumped the cloudy wort back into my mash bucket. Then I opened the flow on the top bucket, containing clean, hot water, and stood back to watch.
What I saw was a completely hands-off experience of sparging my mash, dumping out into my boil pot. I didn’t have a good method to see when I should stop sparging, so I waited until the wort got lighter in color, and called it good.
Dry hopping can be a very effective method for getting that wonderful hoppy aroma and flavor in your beer. I began this practice a little over a year ago, and combined with a good bittering hop in the boil, provides a good balance of bittering, taste and aroma.
This past batch, the same hop variety was going in for flavor and dry hopping, and I purchased a 2oz. package of plugs.
What a mistake.
I failed to realize that the plugs were larger than the opening of the glass carbouys I use for my secondary, which made it quite difficult to get the dried hops in. I ended up using a butter knife to break the plug in half laterally, and then shoved it through the opening as best I could, the thinner plug discs allowed for some flex to fit through the opening.
I have no idea how they will perform as far as the flavor and aroma go, but I do know I will make sure I have whole or pellet hops for my next dry-hopping.