It’s almost my 1 year homebrewing anniversary! I feel like our tiny little operation has come quite a long way from when we first started, with the most basic of starter equipment, brewing with just ever-so-slightly modified partial-mash kits, working through a rough patch of some weird sort of hybrid brew-in-bag + manual sparging deal where we could literally not get our final products up above the 5% alcohol marker, to now – finally able to produce a pretty solid beer & ready to move on to a fancy pants true all-grain sparging operation.
I feel like I will never stop learning & being amazed by all the million variables that can completely make, break, or change a brewing outcome. Every time I listen to someone talk about their brewing experiences, or go to a lecture on the process, I come away with some new bit of info that I had no idea about. Just last week I learned that the temperature of your wort can completely change a hydrometer reading – I never realized how important it was to chill before you take readings! I think that's part of the reason I love homebrewing so much - when I was in college, my favorite classes were always the ones I had literally no previous experience with, because it felt like I was learning something truly brand new (hello Japanese, Logic, & Music Theory). Beer is the same way - be it the science of brewing itself, or just the cool random knowledge that comes with it.
Our last two completed beers (a Rye IPA with honey & peppercorns, and a wet hop harvest ale brewed with the fruits of my very own Cascade & Centennial hop plants) were pretty damn delicious, but let me tell you how fun it is to stand over your wort pouring measuring cups full of hot water through a bag of 15 lbs of grain for 90 minutes….not very. So, we at long last bit the bullet & bought everything we needed build ourselves a sparge unit. My dad & our brew buddy put together the prototype sparge shelving unit & away we went.
There’s still a lot of work to be done before we have a finished product – not to mention the learning curve of using it (we let the water through far too quickly – a 60 minute mash was done in about 20…needless to say, we had to do some fancy guess work from there to re-saturate the grain and try to get some more sugars out). I also made my very own yeast starter!!
I designed the recipe we used on this one from scratch, taking a “robust” style porter and giving it a fall spin – we added a chopped up & roasted, caramelized pie pumpkins first to the sparge water to steep & then to the mash for a little Halloween flair, and then saturated the boil with farm fresh Michigan maple syrup. I also added a crap ton of biscuit malt in the hopes that the end result would taste like a warm, cozy, fall breakfast - pumpkin spice waffles with syrup & a hint of coffee. (If I get even half of that I'll be happy).
Sometimes I think the entire reason we brew, though, is for the excuse to come up with incredible new things to grill while we do it – this time around we stuffed a 4 lb pork roast with chorizo, tomatoes, raisins & almonds and let it cook away for a couple hours….godly. I mean, just look at that beauty - I didn't even mind eating it for days afterward.
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