Imperial Stout - double mash?

[brewinhard]

A tip, do everything you can the night before.

+1

I'm an early riser anyways, but I even prep my coffee maker. There's nothing quite like waking up to hot coffee & just stepping outside to fire the burners without dealing with anything else. I can get my HERMS coil & HLT close to temp before I'm done wiping the sleep out of my eyes. I can start brewing by 5 & be cleaned up in the early afternoon. I hate it when that 2nd batch is still working when it's starting to get late & I'm tired.

I even like to weigh out all my hop additions into small Gladware containers. I nest them with late additions on bottom & bittering additions on top, the 2nd batch under the 1st. It only requires one lid & I use blue painters tape to keep them together when I throw them back in the freezer overnight. I do it in one stack so I can just dump the top container in when a timer goes off without thinking about it or reading any labels. The milled grain buckets all have lids on, but they're stacked essentially the same way.

Jesus! I bet you plan an amazing wedding too!

[Ozwald]

Jesus! I bet you plan an amazing wedding too!

I tried, but for some reason I couldn't book Cannibal Corpse to play Pachebel's Canon in D. I thought at least Fischer would be down.

Some people refrain from drinking to not screw up their brew, I just take the potentials out of the equation. Do all the thinking the day before & brew day is a lot more fun. The scrambling around to beat the next timer part is just a pain in the ass. When it's a double-brew... yeah... fuck that.

[ElectricLandlord]

I thought I should give you an update on how this brew went.

I first used BeerSmith to calculate the recipe for the full batch. I then used BeerSmith to calculate the grist for a half batch, then did my own calculation of the strike & sparge water volumes, so that after 2 mashes I would end up with the same preboil volume as per the full recipe.

It didn't work perfectly - my preboil gravity from each of the 2 mashes was 1.056 against a target of 1.065. I think there are 2 reasons for this: firstly I assumed I would get a slightly better efficiency on a half batch as opposed to a full batch, but I didn't. Secondly in order to get the right volume of wort I only batch sparged once, where I would normally do twice. As a result my preboil gravity was significantly low.

I already had some sugar (jaggery) planned for the recipe so I increased this from 0.5kg to 1.0kg. I also calculated the boil time I would need to reduce the volume enough to hit the target OG, which meant increasing from a 2 hour boil to a 3 hour boil. Doing this while the second mash was running meant that I could adjust the hopping (basically I just didn't add any hope for the first hour of the boil).

I ended up with a lower volume into the fermenter but bang on my target OG of 1.105. A long long brewday, let's hope the beer turns out OK! I managed to score a pitch of fresh 1272 (American Ale II) from a local friendly micro so hopefully I'll get a good fermentation.