I’m not going to bore you by telling you how I got into this predicament. Suffice to say that my mind was confused BEFORE going into my supplier and, after talking to the guy and NOT MAKING NOTES, a week later I’m completely lost in space.
Here’s where I am. I am brewing an all-grain, pale tomorrow - in about 22 hours. My brew store is a round trip of 4 hours, so the supplies I have are what I’m going to have to use. My grain is 10.5 pounds of 2-row, .5 pounds of Crystal 45 and .5 pounds of Cara pils.
Here is the quiz. I’m going to tell you the hops that I have and would like your suggestion as to how to use them. I THOUGHT that I knew what I was going to do, but the hops that I happen to have are NOT what I had asked for when procuring supplies (nuff said about that).
1 oz. Chinook
2 oz. Centennial
2 oz. Columbus
Assuming a 60 minute boil, how much of what do I use when? I’m nearly sure that I want to use all of the Columbus to dry-hop. If you agree with that, that leaves 2 ounces of Centennial and 1 ounce of Chinook for the bitter, flavor and aroma.
My “sense” is that I want to do something like chinook at 60, 1 ounce of centennial at 10 and the last once of Centennial at 5. With the Columbus for the dry hop.
Can anyone tell me if that would be a decent idea?
tha’ll certainly work. however, if it were me, I’d use the columbus for the flavor additions and centennial for late flavor and dry hop. the chinook is a good bittering hop. columbus (also called tomahawk) is a high alpha, but dual purpose hop. whatever you decide to do, pay attention to your results. see if you’re happy or if you’d like to try a different tack next time. take good notes.
Need to know the AA% of each of what hops you have. You said you want to make a pale ale… how many IBUs are you shooting for? or do you want to make something closer to an IPA? but otherwise the hop sched you have can/will work.
Give this some thought. It’s similar to how I hop most of my APA’s & IPA’s. I really enjoy the flavor & aroma of the late additions. ~ 40 IBU’s. Cheers!!!
10 minutes
.5 oz Columbus
.5 oz Chinook
.5 oz. Centennial
5 minutes
.5 oz Columbus
.5 oz Chinook
.5 oz. Centennial
Columbus is a perfect hop for late and dry hopping. Centennial is great flavor hop but a great all around hop. Chinook is a love/hate hop - do you personally like the flavor of Chinook (or the flavor description)? IMO chinook is great with centennial as a flavor addition, but like I said some people hate it. If you wanted you could use some of the Chinook as FWH, for subtle flavoring. Or if you didn’t want any flavoring from the Chinook but still want a bit of hop complexity, you could go with
1 oz Chinook 60 min
1 oz centennial 10 min
1 oz Columbus 5 min
1 oz centennial dry hop
1 oz Columbus dry hop
Really it’s up to you and your best bet is to read up on the flavor and aroma descriptions of each hop and decide for yourself.
If you want a moderate bitterness and more flavor/aroma then this is the way to go. If you like a more firm bitterness then adjust by increasing the bittering addition (60min).
I went back & changed it a little after running it through the gonkulator. It was about 80 IBU’s as originally posted. A little hoppy for a Pale Ale, at least for me.
With this hop schedule, the grains you mentioned and assuming 75% Efficiency & and FG of 1.010 - I’m getting an OG of 1.063. Alcohol by Volume of 6.9% and IBU’s of 40. Cheers!!!
10 minutes
.5 oz Columbus
.5 oz Chinook
.5 oz. Centennial
5 minutes
.5 oz Columbus
.5 oz Chinook
.5 oz. Centennial
Okay, brewing done and, so far, I’m very pleased. Thanks again to all the suggestions. What I did was the following:
.5 oz Centennial at FWH
.5 oz Chinook at 60
.5 oz Columbus at 10
.5 oz Columbus, .5 oz Chinook, .5 oz Centennial at 5
.5 oz Columbus, .5 oz Centennial at 0
(will dry hop with .5 oz Centennial, .5 oz Columbus)
OG 1.062. Nearly equal to what Hamiltont forecast.
By the way, for fly sparging I used the “Zapap Lauter Tun” as described in the Papazian book. I drilled the holes a bit smaller than he suggested and I added a layer of padding from Home Depot that is shelf lining for a heavy tool drawer - the holes looked perfect. It worked REALLY well. Steady flow of very clear liquid in the sparge and I took about an hour for the process. After 40 minutes all hints of sweetness was gone from the run off. It was a big gamble for me, because I know most (all?) of you use a different process but this looked like the easiest for me and I wanted to try it. Big victory for me here.
All in all, I have really high hopes!
Thanks a ton again for the help!
Don
Sorry, poor explanation. I was still worried about grain getting through the holes I drilled and getting stuck in the tap/piping coming off the bottling bucket (into which the lauter tun leeched wort - is it really “wort” at this time?), so I put a layer of this shelf material, which had much smaller holes than the ones I drilled in the bottom of the bucket, in the bottom of the lauter tun to serve as another “sieve” in the bottom of that bucket. The holes in this plastic “fabric” were very much akin to the size of the holes in the mini-cooler sieve material that I always used for my extract brewing from the kit I purchased when I first got in to brewing.
So, if you can picture: I set the lauter tun with the extra sieve material on the bottom inside the bottling bucket - it fit so there was about 4 inches left in the bottom bucket. Then I attached clear tubing to the tap of the bottling bucket and and directed it into a 8 gallon kettle to catch the “wort”. I scooped all of the steeped mash into the top bucket and proceeded to sparge 4 gallons of heated water over the grain, about a quart at a time keeping a layer of water on top of the grain. It took an hour, with the flow into the kettle controlled by the tap in the bottling bucket. As a noob to the all-grain process, I think this would be considered fly sparging.
Long explanation and probably confusing, but I tried to be clear for anyone who might want to consider doing the sparge process this way. As well as the process that everyone here seems to use works (the custom manifold with slits cut into it in in the bottom of a 48 quart cooler) doing batch sparging, I just wanted to lay out another way to sparge that worked really well and did not require making that daunting (to me) constructed manifold.
Hope this was clear - if anyone was really interested.
Don
I do the same thing without the padding. That is, I have a bucket in bucket lauter tun and fly sparge. I put the whole thing in an insulated box so that I can use it as a mash tun as well, avoiding the need to transfer between mash tun and lauter tun.
Nothing to do with hops, but still on the beer I mentioned here.
I brewed on April 30. Racked to secondary on May 5. Today is 3 weeks and 2 days
since racking (nearly a month since brewing). I know, I’m told not to trust bubble rate
but note the following. 2 weeks ago the bubble rate was 70 seconds. 1 week ago
the bubble rate was 50 seconds. Today, the bubble rate is 30 seconds.
This is just making no sense to me. I did make a seemingly very good starter, but should
this not have calmed down by now?
This morning, I took a sample and the hydrometer reading is 1.011. I KNOW that, according
to this, the beer is ready to bottle. However, with that bubble rate I’m afraid of blowing up
bottles (been there, done that). By the way Hamiltont’s estimate of OG and FG was just
spot on (where do I find a calculator like that??).
So, what should I do? Drinking the beer, it seems like probably my best to date and I’m
anxious to get this done (also need the space for another batch).
You guys have been SO helpful, thought I’d make this plea.
It could be bubbling for a number of reasons, including temperature fluctuations. Bottle it.
Next time, don’t rack to secondary until the beer is finished, then rack to a bottling bucket and bottle it. It’s been 4 weeks, if you’d left it in primary you probably could have bottled it 2 weeks ago.
Have you been tasting the samples you’ve drawn off for gravity readings? If you’re getting off-flavors, it could be a sign that you’ve got an incipient infection (probably wild yeast or lactobacillus).
In either case, the increase in bubbling might be a sign that one of the bad bugs gobbling up the dextrins in your beer.
In any case, bottle it, let it condition for a week and taste it again. A long, slow, but intense gushing means that you’ve got an infection (unless you overprimed or bottled before you hit your FG). A crisp, yogurt-like sour which you can only detect in flavor means lactobacillus infection, while smoky, medicinal or clove-like aromas and flavors means wild yeast.
If you’re worried about bottle bombs, put your bottles in a covered plastic storage bin - the lid and sides will catch any shrapnel, the bottom will catch any spills. Alternately, put the bottles in a sacrificial cardboard box on a surface you can easily clean and sanitize like a basement or garage floor. If you do get a bottle explosion, just remember to not pick up the soggy cardboard box!
If you do get bottle bombs, try to chill the remaining bottles to as close to freezing as you can get. Then carefully uncap them while wearing leather gloves, a long-sleeved shirt and safety goggles.
I tend to trust the bubbles more than others. Unless you’re sure they’re from temperature fluctuations, I’d wait ot bottle to avoid bottle bombs.
Edit: And if you’re going to go the cardboard box route, seal the box. I had a bottle bomb go off in one that was just closed, but not sealed. I had beer on the ceiling…