One Night Stand

As mentioned before, this is the first all grain batch I ever made. It was done using an igloo water cooler and stock pot on the stove. It was named “One Night Stand” because the entire five gallon corney keg went in one night at my best friend’s cookout.

I am not categorizing this as a recipe because it is not a “full” recipe by my standards these days. I have no salt additions in it, not even the water that was used. It is essentially an ingredient list with some basic instructions.

But basic is the intention here. The goal, as my friend Tom explained when we built this, is to get an understanding of the ingredients. As you begin to understand what the different ingredients bring to the table, you will be in a better position to build interesting and inspiring recipes of your own.

Instructions:

If you don’t own a barley crusher, purchase your grains pre-milled.

Shoot for a mash thickness of 1.25, so you’ll add the milled the grains to about 6.5 gallons of 162F degree water to the milled grains in the igloo cooler. You are shooting for a mash temperature of 152 degrees. Stir it up to ensure the grains are all covered with the strike water. You want to ensure you do not have any clumps, referred to as “dough balls”. Put the lid on the cooler and let the mash go for 60 minutes. 

Next you want to recirculate the mash to get the grain bed set. This is simply done by pulling some of the sweet wort out of the spout and gently pouring it back in the mash. The first few pulls will most likely be cloudy from proteins and possibly have pieces of grain in it. 

I did a batch sparge for this recipe because it is the easiest to do and the goal was to learn about doing an all grain recipe (as well as understanding the ingredients). Batch sparging is simply adding your sparge water all at the same time and collecting the runnings from there in your stock pot. You are looking to collect about 6 gallons to account for boil off and the trub that will be in the bottom of the kettle from the hops.

You will want to have a spray bottle with water on hand to deal with hot break. Spraying the hot break will help prevent boil-over. Once the hot break has ended, the boil timer starts.

There are three hop additions for this recipe, all of which are Chinook hops. The alpha acid content was 13% for the lot. There is a 1.25 oz addition at 60 minutes – this would be right after the hot break ends. 1.25 oz addition at 20 minutes and the final addition at 0 minutes (flame-out).

Next, we need to chill the wort down to pitching temperature (68 degrees F) as quickly as possible. For this we will use an immersion chiller. The immersion chiller will be hooked up to your sink and have cold water circulating through it to chill the wort. You’ll want to stir the wort to allow for good coverage against the coil.

Once it is cooled, transfer from the pot into the sanitized carboy with vinyl tubing that reaches to the bottom of the carboy. After filling, we need to get oxygen into the solution so the yeast can breathe. For this we use a stainless steel aeration mixer. Attach it to the Milwaukee Drill, insert into the carboy and run at full power for 60 seconds.

We are finally ready to pitch the SafAle US-05 yeast. Sanitize the yeast packet and scissors with Star San, cut the packet open and carefully pour it into the carboy. Put the bung in, fill the airlock with Star San and insert the airlock into the bung. Put the carboy in an area of your home that will stay at a consistently cool temperature. The yeast will generate heat, so put it someplace that stays below 68 degrees. Within 24 hours you should begin seeing activity in the airlock!