01/13/2012 – Created 1.6L starter

2 cups DME
The starter looks like a snow globe. Big globs of yeast stuck together, swirling in the flask. Joe took a video of it with his phone.
White Labs English Ale Yeast WLP002

1/15/2012 – Brew Day

0.5 lb – Brown malt
1 lb – 2-row malt
0.5 lb – Crystal 60L malt
0.5 lb – Crystal 90L malt
1 lb – Munich malt
0.25 lb – De-bittered black malt
10 lb – Extra pale malt
1 oz – Northern brewer hop pellets (60 min)
0.5 oz – Styrian aurora (15 min)
0.5 oz – Styrian aurora (5 min)

• 8 drops defoamer to brew kettle 5 minutes before end of boil
• 1 tsp Irish Moss 15 minutes before end of boil
• No alcohol boost. With 10# of liquid malt, this is already a big beer.
• Wort is VERY dark.
• Aerated with pure O2 for 45 seconds.
• The wort was so thick that it was taking a long time to try to filter out the crap (hops, irish moss leavings, etc…). It would not drop out of solution, despite sitting for a half hour. We ended up simply pouring the entire wort into the fermenter without filtering.
• OG after going into primary fermenter carboy was 1.087. 21% Brix
• Poured off the majority of the weak beer from the starter, leaving about a cup and a half, and lot of yeast, and poured that into the carboy.
• Put carboy with a blowoff cap and tube into a temperature-controlled fermenter out in the garage, with the temp set to 68 degrees. It came to temp within five hours, about the time the yeast had become active.
• Within 7 hours, yeast was already extremely active. Temp has stayed within 0.5 degrees of 68.
• Massive eruption of crud through the blowoff tube. It was so violent that sanitizer and dregs were splashing out of the blowoff bucket onto the floor of the fermenter. Some ran down through a crack at the edge, and into the wireless sensor node, shorting it. It took us about an hour and a half to get the node disassembled, cleaned with very pure isopropyl alcohol spray designed for cleaning electronics, the fermenter cleaned and dried, and the node remounted and tested. Once we did that, we were again able to maintain the temp at 68 degrees. During the episode, the temp of the brew in the carboy may have risen to perhaps 72 degrees for an hour or two, but we brought it back down quickly.
• By the end of the violent fermentation, it seems that we’ve lost somewhere between ¼ and ½ gallon from the carboy.

01/21/2012 – Rack to secondary

Gravity: 1.021, 11.9 %Brix (8.65% ABV)

2/16/2012 – Bottled 12, kegged the rest on

FG: 1.019, 11.6 Brix (8.91% ABV)
Used carb tabs on the bottles
Force carbonated the keg to 2.3 vol CO2