As mentioned previously, we are finally brewing! Four batches have been made so far. But, two of them may be headed for the drain...
Due to a combination of yeast and pH adjustment issues the first batch of Pour...Wait...Repeat didn't ferment fully and nothing seems to be able to get it restarted. It will be dumped as soon as I muster up the courage to do it (or need the tank space). The first batch of Movin' On fermented OK but I am having a lot of trouble getting it to clarify. I originally wanted to stay away from filtering my beer and just use finings to get the final beer clarity that I wanted. For several technical reasons (that I won't go into here) this no longer appears to be possible. So, the filter arrived yesterday. If I can get the beer clear without messing it up, we just might have something sellable. The first batch of the Saison is still fermenting (it takes a while). The second batch of Pour...Wait...Repeat is going in the fermenter today so we'll see how it goes.
This wasn't completely unexpected. When you are scaling up batches,
learning new equipment, and basically just trying to figure out how to
make it all work there's bound to be some issues. You can only test so much by running water through the tanks. Since the first brew day I have modified the mash tun screens, adjusted the kettle burner, modified my grain bins, and as I mentioned, determined that we will have to filter. In the next week I will be having my heat exchanger modified to increase its capacity and be installing an additional glycol unit to help with some cooling issues that I am having. All of this was unanticipated, but as I said, not unexpected. I knew there would be some things come up in the brewing process that would need to be modified, I just didn't know what they were...until now.
So what impact does this have on the "official launch". Well its going to be at least a few more weeks. As the title says, I will sell no beer before its time. You only get one chance to make a first impression so I want to make sure everything is right before we hit the market. The learning curve in this process is steep, but I'm getting exponentially "smarter" every day...
Stay tuned...
