Godessa's PitWit

This was done as part of Basic Brewing/BYO's collaborative experiment. Yay science!

Recipe

Batch size: 5 gallons

Grain bill:

• 5 lbs 2-row
• 4 lbs wheat malt
• 0.5 lb Cara 8
• 0.5 lb wheat flakes
• 0.5 lb Carastan

Hops:

• 1 oz Willamette @ 60 mins

Add'l ingredients: 1 oz dried bitter orange peel

Yeast: Wyeast 3944

Prep

March 27, 2009: Smacked the Wyeast pack, then made a 1 litre starter with 130 g of pale malt extract.

Brew Day

Marchh 28, 2009: 4 gallons of strike water to 168F; mashed in my plastic tub fermenter, which worked perfectly. Temperature was 156 - 160 F (kept getting different measurements depending on how much I stirred). Dropped down to 142F -- should have wrapped the bucket with a towel. Approx. 2.75 gallons first runnings @ 1.054, which puts me at about 61% efficiency. Another 2.5 gallons for sparging, so total volume about 5.25 gallons or so.

Final volume was 4.5 gallons @ 1.048.

Bottling

April 11, 2009: Bottled 2 gallons; gravity 1.009, so about 5.25% ABV. Added 1/4 tsp ground coriander...not even sure if it was worth it, since it wasn't fresh and it was such a small amount. 50 g dextrose.

April 26, 2009: Bottled the rest; 1.008 gravity. 7.5 litres yield; maybe 6 litres last time? 50g dextrose for priming.

Tasting

Date: