Brewing Until 2AM? Sure, Sign Me Up

dkwandt wrote:just curious, how many extra gallons of water did you have to boil? what was you pre boil gravity as compared to your OG? you boling about 1 gallon an hour? i am curious on the gravities for both actually. i may go 120 min, but 3hours wow great patients there!

sparge was that normal to?

I would say, all said and done, roughly 3 gallons above and beyond the intended terminal volume was necessary. In this case, I wanted about 6 gallons at the end of the boil (hop loss and all that good stuff) so I could put about 5.5 gallons to the carboy, 5.25 to my oak barrel and hopefully about 5 to my keg. That said, the initial boil volume was roughly 9-9.5 gallons in this case and boil-off was about 1 gallon an hour.

This, of course, called for a longer, bigger sparge than usual, so it did affect my pre-boil gravity a bit. My first runnings were fine, but by the time everything got into the kettle, I'd say I was about 10 to 12 points lower than my intended 1.052-1.054 starting gravity, though that could've been a little bit off due to the temperature. Luckily, after the boil, things got back where they needed to be and was back up to 1.060 with the addition of my candi sugar.

I didn't mind it, but it does get a little boring. The worst part is waiting for one boil to finish so you can clean up and get the 2nd beer's mash sparged into the boil kettle.

just curious, how many extra gallons of water did you have to boil? what was you pre boil gravity as compared to your OG? you boling about 1 gallon an hour? i am curious on the gravities for both actually. i may go 120 min, but 3hours wow great patients there!

sparge was that normal to?

dkwandt wrote:so do you still only do 60 min hop additions? how does that work in this process?

In the case of long boils like these, you can treat any time above 60 minutes as a pre-boil boil. No matter how long you've boiled for, once you get down to your last 60 minutes, treat it as you would a normal boil. In my case, I had an ounce to add at 40 minutes, 1 ounce at 20 and another ounce at 10 minutes remaining. Randi's recipe was a little different, of course, but all her additions were within that last 60 minute window, too.

so do you still only do 60 min hop additions? how does that work in this process?

Looks like you two did yeoman's work on that back to back. I'm sure you'll be rewarded with some mighty fine beer.

Agreed! Lesson learned there. I've got some pic's of Mike's grain and homegrown hops that went into his brew. Then the bottom row is my multiple bucket grain bill and the darkness filling into the carboy. Here's to hoping the taste as good as they smelled!

Randi and I finished our back to back batches at about 2 o'clock this morning. Since we started at about 3PM on Saturday a fair question would be, "WTF?" Well, I was brewing a traditional biere de garde. This one is going to be as traditional as it gets. I used 6 row barley, grain adjuncts and chaptelizing, as well as homegrown Brewer's Gold and Strisselspalt. I will then follow the primary fermentation with an extended garding period in my oak cask. Unfortunately, some of the old, old biere de garde brewers would do an extended boil for as long as 12 hours. For some reason, I thought 3 hours would be fun. The good news is that it smelled like the Payottenland itself. Mmm.

Randi was brewing her Russian Imperial Stout, which will also be oak aged, and she wanted to ensure a decent gravity as well as some wort caramelization. This translated to a good deal of sparging and lengthy 3 hour boil. The end result was a wort that tasted great, but I think we learned something else too. Don't brew these types of beers back to back, or you'll end up with a boil time that is as long as one person's brew day alone. Still, I'm looking forward to what will come out as the end result. Just a friendly word of warning!