tried out another brew-in-a-bag batch on friday night which went a lot smoother than the first one. I ended up tweaking the safety champ 2 recipe to only 8lbs of malt in the bag. I made up the extra gravity with 2lbs of amber DME (I picked amber instead of light to bring it up to 15srm and give a little more munich maltiness). I scaled back the hops to 1oz ea @60,10min since the leaf cascade from SCBS packed 8.9%AA. The leaf hops also helped with filtering the wort through the bazooka screen. And finally, I subbed  WY1056 with WY1272 american ale 2 because they say it's a more flocculant strain making clearer beer.

bake had this brilliant idea of clipping the strainer to the kettle with a carabiner during the lauter process to keep it in place (last time the strainer, grain bag, and 9lbs of grain slipped into the hot wort and splashed all over my kitched), which worked like a charm. here's the whole brew session listed:

5gal strike water heated to 140F for dough in
5# maris otter
1#dark munich
1#crystal 60
1#biscuit
mashed @ 152F for 60min
malt bag placed in strainer over kettle
vorlauf 3gal through grain bag to help filter wort
sparged with 2gal near boiling water get to 6gal pre-boil volume
2#amber DME added @ 60min
1oz whole cascade @ 60min
wort chiller @ 20min
1 whirlfloc tablet @ 15min
1oz whole cascade @ 10min
whirlpooled and chilled to 68F
aerated and pitched WY1272 with 1qt starter
OG 16.5brix (1.063) got to use the refractometer brynne got me for my bday -nice.

it's been bubbling steady for 2 days now.


I've also been working on a couple other projects lately:
a stir plate, which I haven't used yet because SCBS didn't get their shipment of stir bars yet.

and a mashjacket for my kettle since I'm using it as a mash tun for biab's and it has a hard time keeping a steady temp. I'll post more about these on the projects page when I finish them up.

-kris