Simcoe and Chinook Single Hop

So for my first beer after moving to Minneapolis (and getting the rest of my brewing supplies that my buddy in Chicago had) I decided I'd brew up a nice light bodied beer and split the batch to single hop with Simcoe's and Chinooks. I wanted Simcoe and a buddy suggested the Chinooks. I'm usually more of a fruity hop type guy (C-Hops) but these both sounded like nice choices that I'm not as familiar with.

Since I still hadn't bought a full sized pot that I could boil a entire 5 gal batch in, I did this inside on my stove. I did have two stainless steal pots though that could handle a split 4 gal batch since they were 5 gal and 4 gal respectively. The base of the recipe was something I found online that was someones made up version of Pliny the Elder (I wish I could find the link to give credit but I didn't realize I'd be doing this half-assed blog). I decided it would be a good recipe to really showcase the hops off.

My brew day was a little shaky since I wasn't 100% sure how I was going to evenly split the batch split. I decided that after I vorlauf I'd just evenly pour the wort into each pot about 4 cups at a time. I did the same with the sparge water and that seemed to work okay. It was hard to tell if the batches were even though since one pot was 4 gal and the other was 5 gal. From there, everything went fairly smoothly.

Recipe -

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Batch Size - 4 Gallons

Boil Size - 5.3 Gallons

Total Grains - 12.8lbs

Anticipated OG - 1.092

Boil Time - 90 min

Grains

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11.2lbs 2 Row Base (37ppg, 1.5L) - 87.5%

0.8lbs Sugar - Cane (42ppg, 0L) - 6.3%

0.4lbs Crystal 40L (42ppg, 40L) - 3.1%

0.4lbs Wheat (38ppg, 2L) - 3.1%

(Batch Split)

Hops

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(1/2 Batch)
1oz Simcoe (13% Plug) - 90 min

1/2oz Simcoe (13% Plug) - 60 min

1/2oz Simcoe (13% Plug) - 30 min

1/2oz Simcoe (13% Plug) - 5 min

1/2oz Simcoe (13% Plug) - Dry Hopped 7 days

(other 1/2 batch)

1oz Chinook (13% Plug) - 90 min
1/2oz Chinook (13% Plug) - 60 min
1/2oz Chinook (13% Plug) - 30 min
1/2oz Chinook (13% Plug) - 5 min
1/2oz Chinook (13% Plug) - Dry Hopped 7 days

Yeast

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Wyeast 1056 - American Ale (73-77%, 60-72F)

Brewed October 10th 2009

10/10/2009

Original gravity of both beers were way lower than expected at 1.060. Again my efficiency continues to suck and ended up around 50% (uggghhh....). I need to figure out what I'm doing wrong (grain crush? channeling?) and quick. Since I just split up the batch I don't exactly know how much wort I started with but it should be somewhere around 2.65 gallons per pot. The 5 gal pot is a little wider though so I know I got a bit more boil off on that particular batch (the Simcoe was in the 5 gal pot). This whole thing is by the seat of my pants though so I'm not too worried about it.

10/24/2009

Final gravity checked in at a unbelievable 1.012. Racked both beers and added a 1/2oz of the respective beers hops. Starting to rethink this whole plug hop idea considering I lost quite a bit of wort when racking.

11/1/2009

Racked into my bottling bucket and again lost probably another 1/4 to 1/2 gallon of wort from the massive swelling of the plug hops. The gravity even fell another point or two to somewhere between 1.011 or 1.010. Crazy, I screwed something up that it ended up this dry. I used the small Munton's CarbTabs for the first time on this beer because I've had problems with even carbonation using just dissolved sugar.