An Experiment with Oatmeal

With price of malt increasing, I've started supplementing my grain bills by adding quick oatmeal to my mash.  Prices at my local home brew shop have gone up 25% in the past year, and with the cost of shipping outside the 48 contiguous states, ordering online doesn't seem like a cheaper option (and I like supporting a local business.)

With my last brew (the Mosaic IPA that gave me all that trouble with marbles in the fermenter), I pushed the oats to a level I had not previously touched outside of oatmeal stouts.  This IPA was mellow on gravity, just 1.050, but I used oatmeal to make up ~10.5% of my grains.  It's important to mention that 1.002 of my gravity points were from table sugar.  To keep the oatmeal from becoming a flavor diluting filler adjunct, I toasted it in the oven for an hour at 300 degrees F.  Then I let the oatmeal sit for a week.  I read it can give a harsh flavor if it's added to beer immediately after toasting.  From previous experiments, I found that toasting the oatmeal like this gave me flavor contribution that tasted to me somewhat  like biscuit malt, but with much less intensity by weight than the biscuit malt.

I only bottled the IPA a couple of days ago, but it's already fairly clear.  I was a bit concerned that the extra protein from the oatmeal may give a haze to the beer, but it seems to not have been a problem.  The glass in the photo below has a lot of condensation, but I rubbed a streak of it away near the base of the glass.

As far as flavor, the beer has a nice malty flavor that doesn't seem diluted by the oatmeal at all.  Of course I did use Maris Otter as my base malt.

In the future, I'm planning to push my level of toasted oatmeal a little more, taking it up to 15% of my grain bill in an even lower gravity beer.

Marbles in the Better Bottle

Today I racked a tasty new IPA out of my Better Bottle that I had dry hopped with three ounces of Mosaic hops that I put in a hop bag.

This time I had tried improving my dry hopping by putting marbles in the hop bag to sink it into the beer, hopefully getting more contact with those tasty Mosaic hops and my beer.  The marbles didn't turn out to work so well.  I dropped 12 ounces (by weight) of marbles into the hop bag and the bag still floated.  When I tried to remove the hop bag after racking the beer out of my Better Bottle, it was very difficult.  Usually, I can just pull the bag and it slips out of the Better Bottle.  This time, the marbles ended up pressing together, making it impossible to simply pull the bag out.  I spend half an hour with the open end of the hop bag hanging out of the better bottle, digging out the dry hops and marbles with a long spoon.  If I had done this in a glass carboy, I don't think I would have ever gotten the bag out.  I don't think using marbles to weigh down a dry hop bag is such a great idea unless you're using it in something with a large opening like a plastic bucket.

Luckily, I tasted my hydrometer sample and the beer was great.  Mosaic is a tasty hop.

Temperature Control Update

I got my Ranco today.  It works great, not much different from my thermostat (except that the Ranco actually works), but it feels much more sturdy.  I saw some people leaving their cables dangle freely from the hole in the bottom of the box, but I opted for a cable connector (didn't like the idea of cables being held into place by nothing the terminals in the box).

Update on My Cheap Temperature Control

The repurposed thermostat that is the brain of my cheap temperature control has started malfunctioning after being in service for only about 18 months.  It's been switching from the hold temperature function I usually use to its weekly schedule function.

The thermostat was cheaper than the popular Ranco or Johnson controllers, but with only 18 months of use out of the thermostat, I decided to order a Ranco (which I've read can last for years).

Autosiphon Dime Fix Update; BIAB Water Absorption Rate

I just brewed today and experimented a little with my autosiphon.  In my last entry, I mentioned that I had fixed a problem with the little valve thing popping out of my autosiphon by dropping a dime into the larger tube.  Today, I tried using a nickel, but it kept sinking and blocking off the flow of liquid.  Then I tried two dimes, which seemed to get the siphon started faster.

Besides that, I noticed that the absorption rate of liquid using my dunk sparge brew in a bag method was 0.5 Gal/per Lb of grain (sorry I don't have a metric conversion). 

Autosiphon dime fix

After only about five brews, I've been finding that the little valve flap thing in my autosiphon keeps popping off.  At first, it seemed to only happen when I sucked up hop matter into the autosiphon, but last night the little thing popped out while I was running sanitizer through it.  I had wort chilling, so I didn't have time to spend popping it back in with a pair of tweezers as I've done before.  So I tried dropping a dime in the siphon as I've read on the internet.  It didn't work as well as the little plastic flap, but after a few strokes I did get a siphon started.

In summary, fixing an autosiphon with a dime does work.  (I have the half inch model of the autosiphon.)

Brew in a Bag Session 2

I did my second brew in a bag session today.  It was only four hours from the time I started heating my strike water till my my 65 degree F wort was transferred to a carboy and I finished cleaning up.  I did cut my boil time to 45 minutes.  If that doesn't lead to any dms  issues, I may just shorten up my normal boil time (I usually don't have a 60 minute hop addition anyway).

This batch may have given me an issue with efficiency (only 68%), but I may have messed up my measurement by drawing a sample from near the top of my kettle while I was chilling.  (I usually draw a sample at the end of my boil before everything gets stratified.)  My first brew in a bag batch had a 76% efficiency, so I think I just took a bad sample this time (especially given that this was a lower gravity beer).

I've added some photos this time to show how I executed a brew in a bag session in the kitchen of my condo.

This is my brew kettle just after adding my grains to my strike water.  I used the same formula for calculating my strike water as I did with a water cooler mash tun and it worked perfectly.  That is of course with a towel around my kettle for insulation.  

This is a second pot (5 gal.) that I  put my bag of grains into after removing it from the brew kettle for my mash.  I left the bag in here for about ten minutes and stirred up the grains.  I had an over flow last time.  Now I estimate that for a normal gravity beer, I can only have between 2-2.5 gallons in my 5 gallon "dunk sparge" kettle.  

After my "dunk sparge," I removed my grain bag to a large stainless steel mixing bowl where I caught some extra wort dribbling from the grains.  

Given my experience with this second brew in a bag session, I think I will be using this as my primary all-grain brewing method.  Finally, in my last post, I noted that this method produced very cloudy wort. This time, was no different.  I had a lot of break material in the bottom of my kettle after chilling.  But to keep from losing too much wort, I opted to use a hop sack.  I rarely use hop sacks, but I think I will be using them for brew in a bag.  So far, I think this is the best all-grain method I've found for brewing in my small apartment kitchen.  It's also pretty much as fast as knocking out an extract with specialty grains batch.