Inaguration Day

The essentials were all in place, wooden sword, maple syrup and Idophor.....oh yeah, plus the rest........priorities, you know. This day has been a long time coming. It took me a year to "acquire" all the brewing equipment......cause we all know I'm not too handy, so I couldn't have built it alone....the last piece of the puzzle was the HLT, which we built (by we , I mean Jimmy.....I watched) on that day. We had a little situation arise with the cooler I purchased for it.....the spigot hole was the wrong size for the ball valve. It was a coleman, so let that be a lesson to you, don't use the 5 gallon coleman cooler unless you have some know how on how to completely redesign that area of the cooler for the ball valve. We went on an emergency run at the 11th hour to return the cooler I had purchased at Walmart, and we found a hardware store nearby with the Igloo cooler we needed. Once we got home, Jimmy put in the ball valve, and after a little mix-up with the rubber washer, all was good. As you can see to the right, Karson was definitely ready to brew. He got in there and started cleaning the pine clippings with Sean, as you can see on the left.

Sean came through for us with the propane and the refreshments, and as we all know, you have to put first things first, so we enjoyed several delicious quality beverages before really getting down to business(or should I say, that's HOW we started getting down to business)All of them top of the line, quality craft beer, natch. Sean has impeccable taste, and he brought a veritable treasure trove of overwhelming deliciocity. It was agreed upon that Sean was a capital fellow. And there was much rejoicing.

As you can see to the left, there was quite a bit of grain for this beer - 14 pounds of it. But the Mash Tun accommodated it nicely. After Mash in, the whole thing was quite heavy. We left it on the floor for the whole hour. we stirred the Mash periodically and checked the temperature to make sure we had it right. We ended up adding some more hot water because we missed the mash in temp by a little bit.


You can see out whole basic setup here in the picture on the right. We got a nifty "Ace Hardware" sponsored HLT.......that's the one that was on sale at the hardware shop.......


Here is a picture of the Sparge, not a very good one but I was too busy doing the actual sparge to get a better pic.......you can see the loose pine needles in the brew pot.....

Here is a picture of the boil with the pine needles in the pot........now that's pretty awesome. Also added into the boil was a sizable amount of organic Maple Syrup.

We got roughly 65-70% efficiency and ended with a OG of 1.070. I would like to vorlauf a little longer in the future.......All in all, it was an exhausting, but rewarding day. The usual Shenanigans were gotten up to, which was inevitable.....this pic to the left is one of the few pics I took of the monkeyshines that I feel was appropriate for the blog!!!!  If this day was any indication how every brew day will go down, next time, I will eat my wheaties and get plenty of sleep the night before. And maybe get more of the equipment cleaned and in place. The whole process must have taken around 5 hours. ALSO, next time I'm wearing sunscreen. I got my neck sunburned. I just noticed that I am in none of the pictures.......I guess because I was busier than a one-legged man in a kicking contest....PLUS I took the pictures. So, thus, the LUMBERJACK!!! was brewed and now is bubling away nicely in its primary fermentation bucket. PHEW, this is alot more work than extract brewing fer sure! Well, until next time, This is Tobi signing off.