need to chill out

A buddy of mine is supposed to be coming up this way in two weeks. We were chatting the other night and the topic of beer was brought up (imagine that!). He mentioned that one of his favorite brews was a Two-Hearted Ale offered by a Michigan brewing company called Bell's. I have heard of it before but never tasted it. As it turns out, I have a clone recipe for that beer.

Since he is coming up and I was about due to brew another batch anyway, I made sure to order the ingredients. They arrived Thursday evening, so I brewed last night.

I got everything cleaned up and sanitized and started heating up some water. My process now is to run two pots at the same time. One for steeping grains (which for this batch was 152* for 45 minutes) and the other for heating water to boiling so after steeping, I can add extract and hops without having to wait for it to boil.

This batch had 5 hop additions at a half oz. per. The first one I apparently didn't tie the bag very tightly and it blew open so racking will now be fun as there is a LOT of hop sludge floating around. The rest of the brewing process went smoothly.

I have to admit this was the FIRST time I actually wanted a wort chiller. I have done plenty of full boils now and not once have I ever had a problem getting the wort down to pitching temperature within 20 minutes.

This time, however, it just didn't get there -- not even close! I didn't do anything different, it just never cooled. I could get it down to about 90-100* and then ran out of ice.

I could have emptied the water and put in more cool water, but it wouldn't take long to heat up and probably would've been a waste of water. I just put the lid on the pot and walked away from it for about 10 minutes until I thought it was cool enough to rack into my glass carboy without cracking it.

Upon racking, I noticed I had lost nearly a gallon to evaporation. By the time I added that gallon, the temperature was down to 78* which was close enough to pitch temperature that I could toss in my yeast without worry.

I took a gravity sample and my OG was off by a solid .026. Man! I really hope this hydrometer is wrong or else I screwed up something royally.