Kyle Rankin @kyle@librem.one

I'm so happy I splurged for Penguin's high quality cloth hardcover of War and Peace (Briggs translation). It not only feels great in your hands, it has a silk ribbon bookmark! #booknerd

Can this really be the first time my son has seen Princess Bride? Inconceivable!

One down, ten to go. It was fascinating to learn about early civilizations including ancient Sumeria, Egypt, Babylon, Israel, India, China and Japan. Next up: volume two and ancient Greece!

If there were any doubt my van is the ultimate survival vehicle, look what I just found in there! #liquidgold #vanlife

All that's left is cleaning part 2 and this is where the Grainfather shines. First I dump and rinse the kettle and give it a quick wipe with a rag. Then I fill it with 12L of water and PBW cleaning solution, heat it up to 60C and recirculate 10 mins. Dump, repeat w/ clean water.

While pumping out the wort to the fermenter, I also collected some so I could do a gravity measurement. This tells me how much sugar is in the solution compared to water. Strangely this is *much* lower (1.060) than what I was expecting (1.073!). Many reasons why this could be:

This is a lager so I will ferment it at celler temperatures in a warm fridge (~10C). I have attached a tube to the keg inlet so CO2 the yeast exhausts will bubble out in a jar of sanitizing solution. It takes ~ a month to ferment, another month lagering before ready.

Full and ready to go in the fermenter.

Once the fermenter is almost full, I pitch the yeast. I also sprayed the outside of the yeast container with sanitizing solution about 10 minutes before I opened it so the outside was sterile.

Now that it's cool, I move the counterflow output to my fermentation vessel (a keg) and let the pump transfer it. The keg was sterilized with iodophor solution and the exhaust water from the counterflow chiller. Fun fact: iodophor is on the official list of coronavirus killers!

How do I know when the wort is cool? I have an inline thermometer connected to the wort output on the counterflow chiller.

We must cool the wort to room temp so we don't kill the yeast we add later. The Grainfather comes w/ a counterflow chiller that makes this fast. Pump hot wort through 1 tube, cool water the other. Heat exchanges inside, cool wort goes back to the kettle, hot water to a bucket.

Ten minutes before the end of the boil I connect my counterflow chiller to the pump and recirculate boiling wort through it. Up to now we haven't been concerned with sterilization but after the boil everything the wort touches must be sterile including inside this chiller.

Cleaning part 1! While we wait for the boil to finish it's a great time to clean up equipment we aren't using for the rest of the process.

Adding hops with 60 mins left in the boil. Hops boiled this long produce a bitter flavor and are called "bittering hops". Originally hops were added because it extracts an antibiotic oil, lupulin, which helps prevent infection in the beer, particularly before alcohol is present.

The boil! This recipe calls for a 90min boil but most are 60 mins. We boil wort for a few reasons:
1. Cooking. Maillard reactions develop flavor in the wort
2. Sterilization. Wort is sticky, sugary stuff. Boiling kills microorganisms in the barley that'd infect the beer.

Now we "sparge" or rinse the remaining sugar out of the grain with 10L of 75C water in 1L batches from my electric kettle. The internal grain basket lifts out and rests on top of the kettle so wort and sparge water can drain into the boil kettle that is heating up to 98C.

One the mash completes, we start the "mash out" step. This heats what we can officially call "wort" (pre-beer or sugary barley liquid) up to 75C to denature the enzymes and stop the creation of any more sugars. This also makes it easier to rinse out more sugar in the next step.

Halfway through the mash you can see the effect of recirculating liquid through the grain. The husks and perforated bottom are filtering as they should and the cloudy liquid from 30 minutes ago is much clearer.

While I wait for the mash to complete, I take notes in a notebook I've used for years to track my brewing. This makes it easier to repeat beers I like, and review my notes if something doesn't work out.