Well, almost 4 years later and I decided to try that beer #6 again. I always knew I would. It was my first 5 gallon AG brew and it tasted great once it matured a bit, so I’m gonna see if I can do it again.

Made a couple of slight tweaks though:

• 1oz cascade @ 1 min instead of .5 oz, for hopefully more aroma
• .5 oz Citra @ 30 min instead of .25 oz @ 30 min. (going for more bitterness and citrus)
• 1 oz EKG dry hop instead of .85 oz (no idea where I’d gotten the .85 from anyway)

The main thing that’s different for Beer Viente is, I’M USING SPRINGWATER! I’ll see how that goes. My beer (made with my well water) always seems to have a signature off-taste which isn’t necessarily terrible, but I want to see if I can get a cleaner taste this time. I know there are whole books dedicated to water in brewing, but I’m just going to experiment. And I know there are certain things that spring water is lacking, that my hard water, that stains things in such a lovely shade of brown, brings to the table, but I’m just going to go for it.

Ingredients

Oh, yeah, and Poland Spring, baby.

Brew Day (12/8/19)

1. Started at around 7:30 am – brought ~3.8 gallons spring water to 164F (plus ~1.2 g extra strike water heated. If not used to hit mash temp, it will be used for fly sparging)
2. added water and 1 tbsp PH 5.2 stabilizer to mash tun at 8:40 am, let tun preheat for about a min
3. dough in – hit around 148. Added 1/2 gallon of ~160F of the extra water and hit 151F. Mash for 1 hr. After only 10 mins or so it’s at 150F. About 30 mins in it’s at 148F. 20 mins left and it’s at 147F. 10 mins left… 146F. It’s winter and the house is colder, so this may be why it’s losing so many degrees.
4. As soon as I doughed in, I started heating the remaining .7 gallons of addl water, plus 3 full gallons to 168F – for fly sparge (Beersmith says to use 3.4g) with the addl water already added to the mash tun, I should have more than enough to get a good starting volume for the boil. The target OG is 1.062, but I’m not super concerned about trying to hit it this time. Something in the ballpark would be fine.
5. Sparge water reached target temp of 168F right in time. Fly sparged with all the water and stopped collecting wort at about 6.5 gallons
6. Pre-boil gravity is 1.063
7. Hop additions per above, 1 hour boil
8. Cooled to about 68-70F in 20 mins
9. poured back and forth between brew kettle and bucket 3-4 times. No strainer used. I let everything go in the fermentor. It was very frothy.
10. Not sure how much wort I collected due to all the foam. I’m sure at least 5 gallons
11. Pitched 2 Safale US-05 – sprinkled right in, no rehydration, etc – around 1:15pm
12. Put the fermentor on a heat pad. I’m going to keep an eye on it. I’ve only used this heat pad once with a 1 gallon wine kit and it kept getting too hot. But this is obviously a lot more liquid. No temp controller of any kind 🙁
13. No OG taken! It’s been awhile since I’ve brewed and I completely forgot. Oh well. I will be able to tell if I made beer…
14. A touch of airlock activity an hour after pitching. Heat pad has it at 70F.

Bottling (12/22/2019)

Bottled with 3.6 oz table sugar dissolved in 2 cups boiling spring water. FG around 1.010. There was a LOT of trub in the fermentor since I didn’t attempt to leave any of the hop matter out this time, dry hopping, etc. Got 42 beers out of it. It’s nice and aromatic and tastes really clean. I’m excited to taste the difference using spring water will have made after it’s been bottle conditioned a couple weeks.

Tasting

Despite what I thought when I tasted it on bottling day, this beer has an off flavor and is probably my worst brew to date. Weird. Maybe it was the dry-hopping with EKG hops. I think I don’t like those.