Without a doubt, Belgian Beer is my favorite style of beer. From delightfully light Witbiers in the summer, fruity and spicy Saisons that keep your tastes engaged and Dark Strong Ales for evening sipping and relaxing. There is a Belgian style of beer for any occasion.
Wow, well I have dropped the ball on this for a while. But to my defense, there have been a ton of changes that have taken place to keep me occupied. As the kids have gotten older, they have started more after school activities that keep us busy. Somewhere in there we moved houses, started dedicating more time to my homebrew competition system project Brewerwall. I even changed jobs that focuses my attention more into the world of beer as a software engineer at Precision Fermentation.
Steinbier simply means “stone beer” in German. It is an old brewing process, that involves using super heated rocks
added to the wort to boil it. This process dates back to the early days of brewing, before the introduction of large
metal kettles which could be heated by flame to produce a boil.
The season of the beer festivals has arrived for 2018! To start, we are heading off to the Missouri Beer Festival in Columbia, MO. Through our local homebrew club, The Worts, homebrewers can serve beer to the public and get some really great feedback. This year we brought a few new beers to the scene:
Like a lot that move to all grain, you start out with a 10 gallon water cooler. They work exceptionally well, holding a temp with only a 1°F drop over the course of an hour (on a really cold day). But, I wanted to make some bigger beers. At most, the cooler could hold about 12kg of malt @ 2.5L/KG of water.
As long as you don’t keep them air tight. Over time, yeast will still produce small amounts of Co2. This buildup, in such a small space, can happen quickly and doesn’t take much gas to build up a considerable amount of pressure. Fortunately for myself, I haven’t had an explosion, but I have noticed a lot of my jars started to pop the top.
Build a better blowoff assembly
I got my first stainless conical about 2 years ago. It is a Blichmann 14 gallon Fermenator. I was in heaven. All the
shiny stainless and tri-clamp fittings. It was great, and it still is. Except one small problem: the 1.5” hole in the
top of the conical made for a bung and an airlock. Now in some cases, an airlock will work just fine. However, from my
experiences, 9 out of 10 times I am going to need a blowoff tube.
A grant is a secondary vessel outside of the mash tun that controls, regulates and (in my case) filters the flow to the boil kettle.
Using a grant is a great tool when doing all grain brewing. First, its great for filtering. During your vorlauf you use this recirculation process to clear the runnings and to set the grain bed. With the addition of the grant, you are able to set filters in place to pick up any extra particles or husks. This also holds true when switching over to sparging. Typically the grain bed stays stable as long as your flow is consistent, but occasionally some junk can come through. Another great thing is the ability to control flow. Depending on your setup and where you place your grant, you can let gravity do the work! We can get more into the mechanics though later in this post.