Brews you can Use

Rainy day brew #12 & 35

A co-worker is planning to celebrate the end of his Triathalon season the way god¹ intended: with pork and beer. I'm bringing some of the beer, so I brewed 10 gallons of my favorite Oatmeal Stout today. This, and perhaps a keg of cider should go very nicely with pig.

This was also the first time I used a stir plate to grow the yeast. I had considered building a stir plate for several months, since they're quite expensive new, eBay deals are rare (you get killed on shipping), and there are several well-documented homebuilt stir plate designs out there. Mine got as far as picking up a DC fan and some magnets at a surplus store. Then I headed to Northern Brewer to pick up some stir bars, and happened to walk by the stir plates. It finally occurred to me that a homebuilt stir plate would involve a few more trips to pick up parts, a fair amount of tinkering time, and that after all that, it still might not work. So I broke down and bought one. I'll save such tinkering for when the kids are grown(tm).

For the inagural run, I grew some Essex ale yeast from a couple colonies on an agar plate to a pitchable quantity (well, hopefully pitchable -- I pitched it, after all...). For (my) future reference, the timeline was:

• Monday night: Boil up a quart of starter wort in a 1L flask, pour about 150 mL into a smaller flask. Add stir bars, cap with foil, sterilize (15 psi for 15 minutes), and leave out to cool overnight.
• Tuesday morning: Inoculate smaller flask and start it spinning.
• Wednesday evening: pour contents of smaller flask into larger flask (using magnet to hold stir bar in place), and stir large flask.
• Thursday morning: visible activity in flask, stirring is releasing bubbles. Would probably foam over if not for the squirt of Foam Control (like Mylicon for beer :-).
• Thursday evening: no more visible activity, take it off plate and put it in fridge to settle.

The brew went quite well, but I got hit by a few precursors to the proper praire thunderstorm that rolled through town later that afternoon, hence the name of the brew and title of this post. I would have just ridden it out, except that the toddler alternately wanted to go outside with papa and go inside to keep from getting her hair wet....

¹ Which god is unclear though. Presumably not Allah or Jehovah, both of whom appear to have accepted improper gifts from pro-pig lobbyists. Must be one of those non Ancient Near East gods.