brewed up our java maker this afternoon. it was a fairly long brew session due to a minor mishap. after the hour mash we went to drain the mash tun into the kettle but nothing came out. turns out, the false bottom on the mash tun lifted up while we were mashing, which resulted in about 1 lb of grain to get stuck under the back side of the false bottom, causing a brutal stuck sparge. we quicky macgyver'd our way out of it by pouring our sparge water back into the kettle, and then pouring the mash into our sparge water cooler. little did we know, we'd have to do that a second time and clear the valve of all the grains that were sucked up in it. after about 30 mins we were back on schedule.

for christmas this year, kris hooked us up with a false bottom for the 15 gallon kettle. fuckin sweet! the batch of beer we made today only had 2 oz of pellet hops in it, but it was awesome to see how much work it did.

we overshot the original gravity of 1.044 and ended up at 1.060. oops. i guess our efficiency is just that stellar. while boiling we racked our esb (1.066 - 1.019) to secondary and ended up pitching our java maker right onto the esb's yeast cake. hopefully the fermenters don't blow up.





false bottom ftw






-bake