Anyone else brewing?
I decided to try out Denny's BVIP recipe. I've made a series of mistakes already, but I think it will all work out in the end. Haha.
First was I decided to add a few more pounds of base grain due to expected loss of efficiency, and lower boil off compared to Denny's recipe (I don't get anywhere near 1.5 gallons per hour).
I wanted to do a 10 gallon batch, so I had 38.5# of grain that I milled and overflowed my 60 Qt cooler. I then transferred all the grain over to my 120 Qt cooler with new manifold (which is working great).
I also only typically do 10-11 gallons of strike for a 10 gallon batch. That barely wet the top of the grain bed, so I heated up another 4.5 gallons or so, and added that in. The byproduct of this is that my first runnings were already 1.081, and I was able to get over 10 gallons from the first runnings.
I intended today to be a double brew day anyway, but since the first runnings were so high, I decided to make this a partigyle brew day. I was thinking of doing an amber as my second beer, but that will be on hold till the next time I brew now.
So now I need to figure out a hop schedule for the second runnings, and what style it will be most akin to.