by Jeff Ramberg
From the Worts Hoppening Newsletter
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The First State Brewers attended a large scale all grain brewing session at the Rockford Brewery on Saturday, Feb. 8. We got started by sharing out the donuts and coffee and kicking the boiler into life. Once we had steam pressure up, we began the IPA by filling the lauter tun with 150 F water and arranging the grain bags for loading into the mill. We needed to load 1700 lbs of grain into the mill. |
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A cracked grain conveyor lifts the grain to the lauter tun so we only have to lift the grain once.. The grain takes about 45 min. to load, and then we wait for an hour for mashing. Ph checked out so we raised the temperature to 175 F, and began sparging. The kettle holds 790 gal, (25 BBl). The boil took about 1.75 hrs, counting heatup time. While the boil was in progress, we raked out the spent grain into plastic drums and loaded them on pallets for disposal. A local farmer picks up the spent grain and adds it to his hog feed. |
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Three additions of pellet hops were made, during the boil, the last about 10 min before transfer to the fermenter. The fermenter had been prepared by sanitizing with the clean-in-place sprayballs and then by transfering 50 gal of ale yeast slurry from an adjcent tank. The hot wort was transfered, cooled and oxygenated in one pass with the help of the plate exchanger and high pressure O2 cylinders. |
by Jeff Ramberg
From the Worts Hoppening Newsletter
It seemed like the chance of a lifetime. Maybe it was no big deal, but it seemed too good to be
true when Marty Haugh, the owner of Rockford Brewing Company, actually said OK to the idea of
First State Brewers using his pilot line to brew some all-grain batches of homebrew. That is
why it seemed important to plan this activity down to the last detail. So we did.
In particular, we planned to brew both a lager and an ale batch using as a recipe essentially the same malt stock, but one lightly hopped and the other "massively" hopped. The malt stock consisted of domestic two-row barley flavored slightly with some caramel malt and some wheat malt. Not knowing exactly what Rockford did and did not have in the way of conducting such "small" batches, we (in the best spirits of the Boy Scouts) came prepared with pretty much all the necessary homebrewing implements of destruction.
Certainly by the third beer, but probably much earlier, all of this careful planning went down the "bad beer" drain. This is only a sampling:
So what we ended up with was a starting wort stock "brewed by committee" which we divvied up, inoculated with a generous helping of Rockford ale yeast (thanks, Marty!), and took home to nurture. The near term plan is to bring the finished product to the January meeting to sample the hopefully many different paths the wort stock took in getting to be "the final product."
It was certainly a different experience for the club, and quite a fun one (as usual), although
some of us extract or modified extract brewers were joking about rediscovering why it is that
we extract brew instead of all-grain brew. As for me, I'm still in a state of amazement at
Marty Haugh's generosity and patience at letting First State Brewers come in and run
amok for a day.
reported by CHAZZ [From Gaithersburg Area Brewers Society (GABS) newsletter]
On Saturday May 4th, sixteen and a half members of GABS and the First State Brewers of Delaware celebrated National Homebrew Day with a crawl encompassing five of the six brewpubs in the D.C. environs. The proceedings began at the Old Towne Tavern where the second batch of the Belgian Strong Golden Ale based on Bob Milstead's recipe is now available. On to the Metro and armed with five-dollar all-day passes, we went downtown to Capital City. A prediction by Bill Lawrence that we wouldn't want to spend much time there was accurate; the beer ranged from passable (Amber) to clearly off-flavor (Porter) and horribly over-priced. A couple-block walk took us to what became the day's highlight; the newly opened Dock Street. Contrary to Phyllis Richman, almost everyone liked the food. Consistently with Richman, the beer was dynamite; a Belgian White and Schwartzbier were particularly well received. We were particularly made welcome there with extra servings of an excellent free-of-charge dip for bluecorn chips. Then, back to Metro and also newly-opened and poshly-decorated (like a traditional English pub) Blue-N-Gold in Arlington. We were given good service and a great discount there, but the beers were uneven (someone sent theirs back) and their normal prices are not worth the product. Last stop was Bardo Rodeo and its predictably fine beers and unique environment. All-in-all a very successful afternoon, as members of the two clubs got along famously. Hopefully we can join them in a crawl of New Castle County's two and soon-to-be three brewpubs someday soon.
Some members enjoying a pint at a regional microbrewery festival.
