Ska Brewing Collabeeration: Belgian-American IPA Is In The Fermenter
Ska's 10 Gallon Pilot System
A little over a week ago I went to Ska Brewing early on a Saturday morning and met head brewer Thomas Larsen and we got to work brewing our beer. You can read the recipe here, and in that blog post I forgot to mention the yeast we were to use, which is the Belgian Rochefort yeast.
We started out cleaning the equipment we would need for Ska’s 10 gallon pilot system. This system is a very nice setup, with a hot liquor tank, a mash tun and a brew kettle, all connected via gravity or a pump. After everything was cleaned we started boiling some water. While waiting for the water to boil we went up stairs to mill the grain. Once the grain was milled and the water heated we started our mash. Since I’ve only brewed from extract in the past this part was all new to me, I had read about the process but never actually done it. It wasn’t some much complicated as it was time consuming. I forget the total amount of time the grains were in the mash, but it was about 75 minutes I think.
After that we gravity fed the wort to the brew kettle, from here on out it was familiar territory for me (although with much nicer equipment). We took a reading of our gravity and it came up short from what Beer Smith told us it would be. Rather than have a smaller beer we decided to add 3lbs of amber malt extract. This got us up closer to where we wanted to be. We added hops and boiled for 90 minutes and then got ready to cool it, transfer to the fermenter and add the yeast.
Brew Kettle - Waiting to Boil
This is the part of the brew that most impressed me. When I homebrew I take my brew kettle stick it in a the sink filled with ice cubes and stir, and stir, and stir. It usually takes about 20 minutes of this to get it down to about 80 degrees. At Ska we used a counterflow (I believe this is the correct name) wort chiller. It was a set of copper coils where the wort went in one end and cold water went in another set of coils from the opposite end and chilled it. I was amazed with how well it worked. We had to adjust the flow of wort and cold water because it was cooling it too far below 70 degrees (our desired temperature). From there it went into some sort of contraption (I’m not sure of the name) that was hooked up to compressed air which aerated it (when I home brew I shake/stir the carboy to do this). From there it went right into the fermenter. When all the wort was in we pitched the yeast, set the temperature control to 70 degrees and closed it up. We had a few things to clean and that was it, time for a beer.
The whole process went smoothly and I learned a lot. Not only from our brew, but also just hanging out and watching Thomas do his regular routine in the brew house. It was nearly a full day of brewing, we started around 9:30am and finished right around 5pm.
We let it sit in primary fermentation for about 8 days (7 and a half really) and then bled off some of the yeast and transferred it to two carboys. At this point we tasted it and it was pretty good. The yeast gave it some sweet and fruity flavors. It wasn’t as dry as I’m hoping it will get, it tasted like the yeast still had some more work to do. We dry hopped with 3 oz of Chinook hops in each five gallon carboy. The beer will now sit in carboys for another week or so before getting a fining agent added and chilled to let it settle out. We’ll let it sit a bit longer and then transfer to kegs and carbonate it.
I think the plan is to have it go on tap at the tasting room sometime around February 14th.
The Soggy Coaster just went in to do his brew yesterday. It sounds good and I can’t wait to try it.
One of the Many "Behind the Scenes" Things I saw at Ska. Spent Grain on It's Way to Becoming Elk Food
