Self induced ugly

Earlier this month, I made my first whole batch with my one barrel system. I made a pre-prohibition porter, or at least that's what I'm calling it. I am cheating a little and using Cascade for some hop flavor, but mostly Cluster to stay true to the style. I made a small pilot batch last month. My small batch ended up having a little too much hop flavor to it (in my opinion), but I felt confident enough in my recipe tweak to take the leap and make the big batch. I don't know if I'd call it a total success, but it did generate palatable beer, and it did show me where I needed to make adjustments to the system.

First, my commercial burner didn't work out. I'm sure that's my own fault. I thought I could get away with a residential type hook-up of propane to the commercial burner. Ultimately, I couldn't generate enough heat without sacrificing combustion efficiency. So I abandoned that, temporarily until I invest in a better hook-up, and pulled some simple Bayou Classic outdoor burners together. During the big brew day, I couldn't generate enough heat with them to get a proper boil (it really just simmered a bit). I was able to fix this with some simple modifications to group the actual burning elements together closer (read as drilled new holes and moved the elements under the kettle better).

Next, my wort got stuck trying to transfer it through the heat exchanger after the boil. Again, my own fault. I figured I wasn't using much hops, and I wouldn't have a clog. I was wrong. I clogged the stock pick-up tube of the Blichmann kettle almost immediately. Its a simple fix, I just added a compression type fitting to the tube that adapts to a tube-screen. But it made for a miserable experience on brew day. All I could think to do was manually scoop out about 4 - 5 gallons at a time into a 8 gal kettle, cool it with an immersion chiller, and dump it into the fermenter. Needless to say, it took a while.

The fermenting went off without a hitch. My little chiller, pump, and barrel blanket worked like a treat. The mash and sparge went pretty much as planned as well, although I did come out with about 5% lower conversion than I expected. So, I ended up with a barrel of beer that a touch light on gravity (partly from 5% less conversion, and partly because of the lack of evaporation), wasn't really properly boiled, and required way too much time to cool, but fermented more or less perfectly. It tastes great, but I don't know if I want to re-produce the hop profile, seeing as it was generated by a non-boiling condition. This means I can't really evaluate the recipe changes I made, but at least I learned what I needed to do to fine tune my system. I insisted on doing it my way and learning the hard way. But all things considered, I think its going pretty well. I'm ready now to make another batch, I just want to wait until things settle done at work a little first. I expect to release a batch in late October / early November. My biggest road block right now is getting time away from my day job. I've had to travel a lot, and put in some over time lately. That's actually a good thing, I like my day job, and the pace will be back to normal soon enough.