It’s been several months since we moved (and I no longer have a brew house), but I’m back to brewing. I’ve rebuilt the brewstand (I’ll post about that later) and I’m now experimenting with fermenting in Corny kegs.
The first brew is a fairly basic Imperial IPA. Here is a quick pic of the Cornies after the blow off tubes were removed.
I’ve been having some problems fine tuning my all grain system. My efficiency was suffering, so we increased the crush on my barley crusher. This was great for the efficiency, but caused a host of other problems. The false bottom on my mash tun definitely did not like the finer crush and even with recirculation the vorlauf became long and difficult. So this weekend I created a manifold for the mash tun using stainless steel braid. I’m not sure if I will use this with or without the false bottom but I think it should solve the problems created by the finer crush.
The third beer brewed on the new all-grain setup didn’t go well. Just about everything that could go wrong did go wrong during the brew session. And now, to top things off, it appears I have a stuck fermentation. The original gravity was 1.074 and the target for the final gravity is 1.020 and I’m stuck at 1.042. I re-pitched some cooper’s ale yeast and after 24 hours it appears to have done nothing. What to do… 