Brewed up 10 gallons of Black Ale – Black Cat Ale – on Monday, November 29, 2010, with the help of my good friend Steve. He arrived at Two Finger Head Homebrew (TFH) around 11:00 AM. We measured out the malts, started heating water in the hot liquor tank (HLT) to 165 degrees, milled the grain and mashed in at 1:10 PM.
The recipe is a bit different from my usual black ale in that I did not have enough Carafa III that is required, so I substituted what remaining Chocolate Malt I had and some Roasted Barley. We’ll see how this turns out!
The grain bill:
20 # two row
1 # 90L
7 oz Carafa III
5 oz Chocolate Malt
4 oz Roasted Barley
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22 # total grain bill
The hops and additions:
2 oz. Warrior 15.8 AA at 90 mins.
1 oz. Warrior 15.8 AA at 15 mins.
2 Whirlflox tablets at 15 mins.
Mashed in at 151 degrees for an hour. Sparged for just less than an hour. During the sparge, we stopped and stirred and vorlaufed to eliminate channeling in the grain bed. We collected a bit more wort than we wanted to due to being distracted by typical homebrew session distractions. Our target pre boil wort volume was to be 14 gallons, but we ended up with 14.67. We started the boil and had it rolling at 4:09 PM. Since we had more wort than we wanted, we decided to extend the boil to 90 minutes if required. The only thing though is that we added the 60 minutes hops at the beginning of the boil. I do not think extending the boil time by 30 minutes will hurt the finished beer in this regard.
We kept a hard rolling boil to get the volume down to the 11 gallons we wanted at the end of the boil. The propane tank kept icing up around the bottom half and gas flow slowed many times. Shaking the propane tank help get the gas flow back up. I haven’t seen this in past brews. The air temperature at the start of the brew session was around 55 degrees. I think it was about that during the boil. This could have something to do with the tank freezing up. As gas flows through the valve and regulator, the pressure drops and so does the temp, bringing the temp down below freezing.
We hooked up the Therminator counter flow chiller and began to pump boiling wort through it at 15 minutes remaining in the boil. Also added two Whirlflox tablets and the 15 minute hops. After flameout at 5:40 PM, we chilled the wort, recirculating it through the Therminator counter flow chiller. The hose water was around 64 degrees, so the chiller worked really well, bringing the 11 gallons of wort from boiling to 68 degrees in less than thirty minutes. This is a good chill time for Two Finger Head Homebrew – we’re not so lucky in the summer with the high hose water temps.
Once chilled, we ran the wort into two plastic pail fermenters. We hit our target levels in both with nearly zero wort remaining in the boil pot. Specific gravity: SG=1.055. Our recipe suggested 1.054, so we’ll call it a complete success!
I sprinkled one pack of Danstar Windsor ale yeast onto the surface of the wort in each of the fermentation pails, placed them in the 67 degree refrigerator and installed the airlocks.
This brew seemed to go off really well. We usually have some technical issue or something that happens to throw us off. The only unplanned thing was that we drew too much wort during the sparge, so we had to boil for 90 minutes and that was just not a problem!
UPDATE 111210: The beer has be fermenting in the refrigerator at 67 degrees F since brewday for the last two weeks. Today I set the temperature controller to 36 degrees to begin cold crashing. I will leave it for another two weeks and then it will be ready to keg and condition.
