Atlanta Brewing Company

Last Friday (the 15th) James and I decided to give one of the other local micro tours a chance. We've done Sweetwater countless times, I'm not sure why we didn't venture away sooner, but I'm glad we did. The place was pretty crowded by the time we finally got there at 6:15 (doors opened at 6) and continued to get even more crowded all the way up until 7. Seven dollars gets you a pint glass, as well as 6 bottle caps that you can redeem for beers...not a bad deal at all.

The bar area is a little smaller than Sweetwaters, but the waits were never too bad. And the beer was all delicious. My favorite of the night was their Winter Brew with the Peachtree Pale Ale in close second. We also got the chance to talk w/ all the guys that work there. None of the people there were brewmasters or anything, but they all knew a helluva lot more about homebrewing than Jamie and I, so it was fun to shoot the shit with them. We ended up hanging around until close to 11 (places 'closes' at 8) before heading out.

If you haven't read anything on the entire blog, please read this! If someone ever offers you $30 to eat two hop pellets please please don't take that bet. Yeah, it might seem like a good idea after 7 or 8 tasty micros, trust me, its not. Lets just say that I brushed my teeth two times the next night still trying to get the taste out of my mouth. Also, all day Saturday I though I had hops poisoning (ps, they are poisonous to dogs), turns out it was just the Flu. Lucky me.

Second Batch - Smoother

The second time is so much better. We went with the same recipe increased the water and changed our brewing process a little. Some things we will continue, but we still haven't entirely figured the best way to utilize all of our equipment.

Things that went better this time:

• We used the correct amount of water and ended up with 5 gallons when finished
• We pitched the yeast into the wort and shook the carboy to aerate, this gave us a fermentation time of 12 hours instead of 36
• We only worried about sanitation post boil. This saved a lot of time.
• Whirlpooling the wort before draining into the chiller. We were left with a perfect cone. Thanks Adam.
  
• We replaced some of our dirtier tubing. Everything looks cleaner

Things that still need work:

• The sparging process is still challenging us. We are hitting our mash temps and we didn't have any flow problems this time, but we had a lot of particles flowing into our boiling pot. We have a few theories: 1st, we started sparging almost immediately after recirculating the first couple cups of mash. Do we need to let our grains compact before starting the sparging process to form a filter on the false bottom? If we wait, since our mash is flowing out faster than sparge water is coming in, we have to keep opening and closing the drain to keep the mash from bubbling as the cooler empties. Last time we let the cooler totally empty of liquid before we stared sparging and we didn't have a problem with grain flowing into the boiling kettle. 2nd, we used gravity instead of our pump to get the mash into the boiling kettle. Last time, we drained the mash into a bucket which has a hole near the bottom that we have a tube connected to with a pump sending the mash out of our the the bucket and up to the boiling kettle (sitting above the mash ton). This let any grain that was drained out settle to the bottom of the bucket before it was pumped up to the kettle. We thought that just using gravity could save a step and prevent an opportunity for oxygen to get into the mash before the boil. We still aren't sure what to do next time...
• Carbonating a keg... we tried to force carbonate our first batch, it didn't work. We chilled the beer, then racked the beer into the keg from the carboy and pressurized the keg to 25 psi. Then we "shook the fuck out of it" let it sit for 5 hours, shook it again then poured. It was still flat. We are going to wait 3 days and see if we have beer.

Water!

As if the drought was affecting our beer, we had a water shortage while brewing and I promise it was not because Ben "the hippy" Arrington wanted to save water. It seems that we just didn't start with enough in the beginning. We had planned on finishing with a 5 gallon batch of beer, but we ended up with a little more than 2.5 gallons. Since then we have found a couple sites that help calculate how much watch we should start with and we definitely didn't start with enough. Thanks Mike. While starting with 7 gallons in anticipation of losing some water in the mashing process and boiling off about 1 gallon as we prepared the wort, we did not capture the entire picture. We think we failed to anticipate loosing so much water in the mashing process, where the grain absorbs some water, and just general loss of as the liquid makes it way through the entire process . We didn't realize how much would be left over in a couple of the tanks that we used and we also read that the wort looses some of its volume as it is cooled for fermenting. Next time we will be ready though and hopefully be able to make enough for everyone to enjoy. To better brewing!

Fermentation!

That one word text-messaged to me by James made me a very happy man. Well, thats not to exciting you may say...but it is. Typically, the wort will start fermenting within 12 to 36 hours. I believe ours took a total of 38 hours. This could be due to any number of reasons, but is probably because we didn't aerate the wort enough. All we really did was smack the water with a plastic spoon, I think all we succeeded in doing was making a bigger mess and a hell of a lot of foam. That, or maybe the yeast was just too cold (it was outside the fridge, but it was after midnight before we pitched the yeast and was about 45 outside).

Anyways, we had all but given up hope that we would have to re-pitch the yeast, or worse that we would have to dump the carboy out and start over. But no! Our wort is now happily fermenting and is on it's way to becoming real beer.

I've never been so proud.

We are messy

Please pay no attention to the huge mess that we made that you can see in the picture. It was probably Jamie's fault, but we'll do a better job next time...hopefully.

Our First Batch!

This was our first attempt at brewing beer. Hopefully we can turn this in to something bigger and better in the future. We had been talking about starting to brew beer together for probably close to two years before making the plunge. We purchased all the equipment from someone off of craigslist.com that had been brewing for 20 years. Let's just say that we got quite a good deal. In in spirit of jumping right into things and against the advice of everyone we talked to (Mike at the brewshop tried hard to talk us out of it), we decided to start with all grain brewing for our first batch rather than using a malt extract. It was definitely a challenge but we learned a lot. We will post more on our first experience as well as things we learn and questions we have throughout our trials and tribulations. We would appreciate tips and advice as we learn how to become master brewers. Friends, this is also a way to keep you involved in the process as most of you will be testing these "experiments." Thanks for reading and happy brewing.

Jamie and Ben