Batch 12

Grand premier for the newly invested brewing system Grainfather AND with grains crushed by the brewmaster himself!

After I finished ordering the Grainfather and the grain crusher, I was longing so much to brew my next batch. The experience was exactly as easy and joyful as I’d hope for, or even better yet. It was also fulfilling to be able to crush the grain myself instead of having someone else do it, it just adds to the whole experience. Maybe the next step is to grow my own grain and malt it, how cool would that be? I think however it’s more realistic I’ll start growing hops before I start malting but who knows.

Enough about dreams and visions and lets talk more about how the experience was and how the beer turned out. Lets start with the brewing experience. Brewing with the Grainfather was simply wonderful, it was really easy to get started and during the whole brew I felt I had control, a helping factor being the phone app that can be used to control the brewing system and keep track of temperatures for example, how convenient!

I realized one thing during the boil that my hop spider was now too small. After boiling for a couple of minutes the wort was dropping so much that the spider was leaving it, so I had to improvise by lowering it down with a lace. It worked but of course I’d rather buy Mangrove Jacks hop spider that is much bigger than the one I have but I’m not ready to pay another 500 SEK for something I can deal with for free so the smaller, laced one will have to do for the time being.

Moving forward to the fermentation. After 36 hours the yeast still hadn’t shown any activity and I was a bit concerned because this was a liquid yeast and I have only used liquid form once before, wondering if I had done something I shouldn’t have. The reason being why I chose WLP810 was because it was heavily implied that this yeast was the best for making a California Common, or Steam beer, a special hybrid style kind of beer. If you wanna know more about this special beer, you can read more here from the creators, Anchor Brewing Anchor Steam | Historic Craft Lager Beer from California. Anyway, I thought the yeast might be dead but figured I could wait a couple of hours more before running to the store buying more yeast and after 48 hours the airlock finally started showing activity. I’m gonna stay away from liquid yeast in the future as dried yeast is a lot easier to handle and it’s cheaper.

The beer was really good and I’m gonna go out on a limb here and I say I think it’s pretty similar to the original. Even though I don’t have a bottle from Anchor brewing next to me for comparison, my brain immediately though of the original when tasting my own batch. I’m sure it would’ve been different if I had tasted both at the same time but either way it tells me it’s a good beer which I’m very happy with.

I’ll brew this beer again, independent if it’s because I want to stock some really good beer or because I want to try out other California Common recipes, it will be brewed again!