Good day brewing yesterday. Hoping for a pilsner. It came out very strong: O.G. 1.059!

Flavor

Palmer suggests a 2-dimensional flavor spectrum of fruity/malty  bitter/sweet to characterize beer styles.  Eg pilsner is malty-bitter, while IPA is fruity bitter  Weisen is fruity-sweet and dark beers are malty-sweet.  Kolsch, he put right in the center.  Lots of this is from his gospel, too.

Hops: Certainly I associate hoppy with bitter, but cold hopping (eg after the fermentation break) is a favorite of mine because it gives fruity smell without as much bitterness.  This means in flavor space, the hop vector is a diagonal from [malty sweet] downward towards [fruity bitter] with some variation in proportion based on when you add the hops.  Boil the hops to extract bitterness but lose the aroma, & conversely. 

Tannins: astringent. come from hops, grain husks, wood.  High pH and high temp, canonically > 170 encourage them. They can precipitate out (hence the benefit of lagering).  In brewing pilseners and lagers, low buffering capability of the malt makes tannins a risk. Distilled water is recommended (but we have pretty good water here on the front range.)

Sweet: comes from high temperature mashing, when alpha enzymes randomly chop carbohydrates into indigestible lengths (& beta is deactivated), or especially from caramelized malts.  So for example, to avoid sweetness in pilseners, mash cool and don't use any caramel malts.

Fuseols: taste like "hot" alcohols or solvents.  I once had a beer that tasted like turpentine.  Further conditioning cleaned it up though, as the yeast digested the alcohols.  Caused by exuberant early fermentation, eg overly warm temperatures.

Body: comes from proteins.  Oatmeal (with a protein rest) or from most grains, keep the protein rest short so you don't break down what's left in the grain.

Fruity: comes from esters, from yeast. Ale yeast & warmer fermentation tends to fruity, lager yeast and cold fermentation leans  more to "clean"

Vinegar: Bacteria.

Some notes from the "all-grain" mash

I just made another beer, and it was a long-hard haul. Let's start with Cliff's notes for the ADD, regarding the mash:

• Wait to let temp equalize before adjusting, 
• stir lots (dough balls), 
• Mash at LEAST an hour, 
• have a good reserve of sparge water (mash calcs don't attempt to estimate the water absorbed by the mash).  

I'll clean up the post below later,( maybe.) It's pretty rough right now. I'm just trying to get it all down while fresh in my mind...

Why?  Haven't I got this process wired by now?  Well, yes & no.  Some things did go very well, most notably (since the last few) I didn't get tied up by any air lock problems or siphoning failures, or spill over the whole carboy or pop the hose out of a vessel it was trying to fill.

One problem was the temperature of the mash. With 12lb of grain, the cooler was more than half full!  How much water could it hold, could it get and stay hot enough?  It was a bitterly cold day outside, well 20, anyway. This was a big problem for my burner.  Fortunately I had another propane tank because I needed to swap them to get the wort boiling. The first tank wasn't empty just low enough to reduce the flame a little.  I had dressed the pot in aluminum drapes, but a lot more effort would be needed to really cut down the heat loss. I may just be unable to brew on colder days.

Before that though, the tun worked great. I needn't have worried about the cold weather, because it held temperature very well. Also, (this is a lesson I'm trying to archive) it's really important to stir the mash: I did an ok job of that but got some "dough balls" which I noticed later, when discarding the grain. The other thing I need to do is WAIT for the temperature to equalize, including some good stirring.  I ended up thinking it was too cold, too hot, adding snow and boiling water to fix it, and getting a totally full cooler along the way.  I wanted a three step mash (125, 150, 155) but who knows what I did really?  Quantitative planning went out the window. Sigh.

Later, lautering too was a small junk show with me playing musical pots. I had just the tun, the boil pot / hot liquor tank (double duty) and my old 4 gal boil pot. Surely enough? Yes, but only if used correctly. I got the 4 pot bucket 2/3 full before topping off the tun and then discarding the rest of the hot water (so I could move the wort to the boil pot and resume lautering). I should have really filled it because later I had to use perhaps 6L of hot tap water because I wanted to sparge more. My grain filled the tun about 2/3 up and it held a lot of water! So I may need a third pot or something to "gracefully" get all the sparging done.  At the end I squeezed the grainbed and got some more wort out, several cups. I wanted a lot because I figured I'd have to boil a lot & that was pretty true. After 1:30 of desultory boil (all I could manage) my OG was 40. A good outcome but not an efficient mash.

Still confused about Lovibond (darkness) and Lintner (diastatic power).  I used 10lb Colorado 2 row (Lovibond=2) and 2Lb CaraRed. Northern Brewer

Essential equipment.

What are the most important parts of fancier brewing system? Well I guess the next step is to get some actual experience doing all grain brewing, to learn what would be good. Meanwhile I'm thinking about how to make it work well and be slick.  By slick I mean visually appealing (steampunk German submarine is the look, I think) smooth to use & easy to clean.  I've been looking online, but I'm not sure about the canonical 3-keg approach. It still seems too complex and gadgety to me. Also overkill.  With a 5 gal bucket I can make more beer than I can ever drink, so a certain amount of minimalism appeals to me.

So, what's really needed?  Here goes, in the order they're needed.

• Mash Tun: I really like the idea of using a drink cooler for a mash tun. All the big boys have fancy temperature control with burners and commensurately necessary recirc pumps. But a cooler holds the temp really well without supervision or gizmos!  What the heck do I want a fancy contraption for?  Well, one answer is that calculating the necessary water infusions to hit your desired temperatures is tricky. OTOH, plumbing frightens me, but calculations, not so much:  so I vote for the system with less pipes and maintenance. Maybe I'll get the 10gal version, depending on how tricky the sparging is with the smaller one.
• Gravity gauge and thermometer.  These are needed at the mash stage, so I list them here.
• Pump? I'd like to keep everything gravity fed.  I think we can get away with no pumps here, as long as the kettle's mounted high enough to drain into a mash tun or fermentor that's sitting on the ground. (For 15 gal equipment, lifting the weight would start to become a problem.) As mentioned above, using a big steel pot that requires heat and recirculation really drives the need for a pump. With the insulated Tun, we can eschew the pump.
• Next, the brew kettle.  Ok you need that.   Why, though, do there have to be two of these?  Why not instead use one pot to heat the mashing water, and that same pot to boil the wort?  Ok, you'll need a bucket to hold some water for an intermediate moment. Duh.  My outdoor grill has a burner, but it can barely achieve a boil: in the winter it'll be tough. I wrapped Al foil around mine so it doesn't lose so much heat to the environment. I think this is a piece of equipment to spend a little more on, most importantly a drain valve, so you don't have to siphon. I've bought this now and like it. I'll add that the spigot's got an internal filter as well, which prevents hops & other debris from plugging the (below described) chiller: very key. One trouble with it, the mesh is fine enough that it traps air! Siphoning type problems recur when you can't get air out.  I think bending it upwards may fix that.
• Spoon marked in gallons for the brew kettle. This is a great piece of simple technology. The kettle's got fittings and filters that make it nonlinear, too.  Another thing for the boil phase is a fine screened strainer, if you want to remove sediment before encanting (?? what word do I want here, for going into the fermenter?)
• Classic wort chiller? Nothing wrong with that concept. However, as soon as the kettle's got a valve, I like Bobby's plans for a counterflow chiller of a garden hose wrapped around a copper pipe though. That seems easy to clean and use. Ok update: I got the materials to make it. So hopefully ...yep, it's operational! It's more important with all grain brewing because it's a big boil, and you can't dilute the hot wort later with cold water so some kind of chiller is really mandatory. Note: oxygenation will be MORE important, 'cause it will all have been boiled.  Yet another update, I no longer like the counterflow chiller. Makes sense in continuous circulation systems with pumps, but when gravity feed from my kettle (with a pretty fine screen filter) gets very low flow and is susceptible to leaks breaking the pressure head.  An ordinary immersion wort chiller just made from a piece of copper pipe doesn't have that problem.
• Fermentor. Well, you certainly  need that, with an airlock. Seems to me that except that it doesn't come apart for cleaning very well,a big carboy is an excellent fermentor. I'll stick with that for the near term. It's worth noting that a 5gal "flow rate" through the brewery (tun, boil, ferment, secondary, bottle) seems like plenty.  Doing that on 2 week centers paced by the fermentation is producing a beer flow I probably can't keep up with, and doesn't mandate a huge equipment inventory. Keeping the weight to man-handleable limits will simplify things, too. A thing about the airlock, in the first days so much scum may come out that just a hose plumbed to a water trap is the way to go.
• Secondary Fermentor.  I'll say yes. I'm a fan because I can make more beer that way. Otherwise the fermentor really controls the pace of the brewery. Less particulates in the beer, too, and some say the primary can damage the flavor after a while. I've heard a lot about oxidizing the beer lately, so plan to use a few dry ice chips to seal O2 away from the beer during the transfer.
• Some bottling accessories include... High pressure bottle washer (thanks, Jm!) long straight plastic extension with a clip to hold the siphon in place, pressure activated filling valve, capper.
• CO2 and fermentor caps. These caps have dual "udders" on top of them and that makes a possibility of a pressure assisted siphon.  I do this to move beer from fermenter to secondary, with a pingpong ball's worth of dry ice in each jug, the secondary vented and the fermenter pressurized. This starts and aids the siphon.
• Fermentor carrier:  I've dropped mine once. Sheesh, for a couple bucks, this is a must have.

Zymurgy

This will be a long boring post but useful to me. It's going to be a homebrewing "manual" of sorts, shamelessly copied from various sources, most expecially (so far) Charlie Papazian's Zymurgy teachings and John Palmer's How to Brew site and one more good one.  Also Adam's sort of led this charge with a recipe document (available only to those with whom the doc's been shared, though.)


So, here are some key topics:

• Steep about 1lb/batch when making an extract beer..Steeped grains will add from 10-20 gravity points /(lb/gal) Don't get them over 170F or tannins will be extracted.
• Mashed grains OTOH will reach about 0.03/lb/gal gravity change. Theoretical max around 38. So far I'm getting about 0.023 though. This "mash calcs" spreadsheet describes the temps and H2O quantities needed.
• Sparging has the potential to generate tannins, especially as temp goes up and pH as well, as the diluted wort loses it's buffering ability. We have good water, so the buffering is far less of a concern here in Colorado. 
• "Degrees Lintner" is the measure of diastatic power (enzymatic concentration). You need > 30L on average for the mash to complete in an hour. (This is the opposite of Lovibond which basically means darkness from roasting and you need 20 Lovibond or Less to mash.) Anyway, the "grain bill" listing type and quantity of grain to be mashed needs to average out to 30 Lintner, eg 2lb 120L "two row" and 6lb of carmelized specialty grain (denatured by the hot malting). 
• The "Original (specific) Gravity" you ferment dare not be too high. The incremental specific gravity for added dry malt extract (DME) is about 0.041/(lb/gal) (about10% less for liquid malt extract) and one to 1.5 lb(DME)/gal is a pretty good quantity. OG above 1.06 is very high.   You can expect to yield 30"points"/lb in mashing, (including the sparge). That's dogma: I certainly haven't achieved it, got perhaps 20 points, on my 3rd try.
• Palmer specifies "...standard mash conditions for most homebrewers: a mash ratio of about 1.5 quarts of water per pound grain, pH of 5.3, temperature of 150-155°F and a time of about one hour." there are multiple temps with different purposes, and higher temps destroy low temp enzymes, so you have to raise the temperature over time. Some good temps and their relevant enzyme are: protease at 130F,  then beta amylase at 145F, & alpha amylase at 157F. An insulated mash tun (drink cooler) will easily hold temp for 45 minutes with just a degree of drop. (Here're two a nice mashing summary videos  from BobbyNJ, who seems pretty expert, and here is linked John Palmer's  mash enzyme chart.
• Sparge with another .5qt/lb to .75qt/lb, probably shooting for about 7gal of wort altogether. Doing this at 170F denatures all the enzymes & fixes the sugar mix. If you went hot (for alpha amylase) then it's important because otherwise the complex sugars will keep getting cut up until the boil starts. Since that's right away, this doesn't seem a big deal to me but maybe the time variability thus introduced is the problem. Doesn't seem like there's a big difference between English (batch) or German (continuous) sparging. German reputed to have higher yields, which matters 'cause it reduces the boil volume... Avoiding temp above 170 requires some attention. Calculate the quarts of H2O to reach 170F and thereafter dilute the sparge water down to 170F.
• A starting gravity measurement is good now. Shoot for 7 gal to boil down to 5, thus the gravity is only 5/7 (71%) what it will be after the boil. Elevated temperature also makes the wort seem weak: at 90F, the hydrometer will read 0.0042 light, 006(100F), 008(110F),  01(120F) and 0.02 light at 160F. Tabulated.  This measurement could motivate some LME addition if deemed necessary (eg if something went wrong with the mash.)
• Boil for an hour to extract hops bitterness. Hops in after the break. No lid: want aromatics to escape. Insulate the pot somehow? (A little Al foil works.)  I'm thinking of straining the break out (not tasty) right before adding hops, and straining the hops out right before the fermenter (plugs the kettle filter).
• CP recommends boiling all the water because chlorine will mess with the beer.  Using pre-boiled and cooled water to speed wort chilling is a good idea though. This is for extract beers that can be boiled in concentrated form. Grain beers though, have to be boiled down to desired gravity, so dilution cooling's not possible.
• Oxygen contact with the fermentation will create vinegar or solvent tastes, so prevent that. (dry ice chips in the bottom of the secondary?) Oxygenate before pitching, only! (...but do it very thoroughly then.)
• you can't pitch the yeast until the wort is truly cooled: I've killed the yeast in the past.
• Hydrate first, & then grow the yeast in a dilute solution: too much sugar can make it hard for yeast to hydrate and get started.
• Add airlock and darkness, and wait.
• Pitch aroma hops after the blow off, or in the secondary. Here again prevent O2 contact, filling the secondary with sterile water, perhaps? ...using CO2.