Saturday went pretty well on the new rig.  We kicked on the heat for the HLT around 0630. We were looking at a long morning as the temperature outside was around 36F.  Tom came over around 0645 with all the ingredients.  For the most part the new rig made everything…quite automatic.  We began doughing in around 0830ish or so.  As I mentioned earlier, we forgot to kill the MLT heat when doughing in and brought temperature up to around 130F – 10F higher than we wanted for the protein rest.  Once the 20 minutes were up, we brought up the MT temperature to 155F and held it there for an hour.  Most things went clock work.  Only minor items, such as when we were doughing in, the sparge arm needed to be removed.  A first for us with this rig.  After the mash, we commenced the boiling and things were pretty much simple at that point.  Another small bump was setting up the wort chiller.  Once we got that going we were able to bring the wort down to 80F and pump it directly into the 27 gallon conical fermenter.  Having an automatic system definitely  lifts the burden on a lot of steps.  Anyways the technical mumbo jumbo is all in the brewblog, so take a look at that if you want.   Here are some more pics:

Adding the grains

Is the beer done yet?!

There are more pictures in the recent pictures sidebar.  Hope you enjoy.  I am going to start scouring the web for more local beer events and other items.

Rob

Overall, pretty successful. Completed the day at around 2:30pm including cleanup. More to follow with pics.

Flame ON! At 0630….Got up earlier than I have been for work

Last week, Max stumbled on a very nice brew sculpture to include several conical fermenters by Blichmann.  So Tom came up with a recipe for the “Inaugural Brew” to break in the new setup.  We plan on running through the system later this week to make sure we understand how it all operates.  So it looks like Bubblehead Brewing just graduated from one sculpture to the next.  As to the old system, we may keep that to allow us to brew 30 gallons at a time.  Time to look into getting into some competitions.  Brew day is Saturday 28th!

O..K… I am “done” with the migration for Bubblehead Brewing. It was a massive crash course in CSS sheets and PHP programming. I was lucky to encounter some decent templates, forums, and a few glasses of my own Raspberry Hefeweissen. It’s interesting to note, in less than one year I went from loving photography and cooking to brewing beer and using photography to document it and cooking out of the pantry for those quick meals when I didn’t have time to make anything due to brewing. Hobbies are wonderful when they all mesh into one nice package. I hope that you enjoy the beginnings of this site but if you are in the same state as me and not going to bed, please visit the drunk forums.

As it is I intend on adding value to this site so that we have a nice centralized location of information to reference.  With the brewblog things should be getting organized in a pinch. Ok….rambling….Going to be as that ACR (Apple Cider – Raspberry) is getting to my noggin more than I would like. Take care..

Rob Bugary

Found this video via www.homebrewtalk.com.  The user, Bobby_M talks about how to fill your bottles from the keg without an expensive “beer-gun”.  Most of us should have this stuff lying around.  I know I will be bringing this over to Tom’s house to get some really good brew soon!

Max and Tom monitoring the mash

We started the morning early…well Tom and Max did.  I arrived around 10am with a massive hangover.  Tom and Max were in a pretty good mood and were happily mucking about while they were mashing the 80 shilling.  I proceeded to fire up my ginormous pot (all 5 gallons) and began my way complicated partial mash of my Saturday Hangover Dunkel.  Needless to say, my brew day wasn’t all peaches and cream.  Between brewing “out of my car” and having spiderwebs in my head, I was quite suprised that everything ended up A-o.k. for the most part.  We finished around 3pm and all of us feel it was a pretty successful day overall.  My headache didn’t go away until late in the evening.

After fooling around for several hours and staying up all night, I have a semi-working start site.  I chose this format because it looked a bit more slick and less cumbersome to update news items.  The brewblog is still kicking and well in use.  This extra page allows me and you all to easier access and communicate to some extent.  I also intend on gathering useful tips or whatnot and publishing that as I go.  Hope you enjoy!

Rob