Oktoberfast

That's not a typo in the title.

I'm sure my large audience has been quietly wondering why I never posted my annual March/April Oktoberfest brewday blogpost.  Answer: I didn't brew my Oktoberfest this year until just yesterday.

Early August (at least in the US Southeast) is not an ideal time to be outside brewing.  But with Oktoberfest 2015 just over 2 months away I had to do something.  I had to brew something.  And I had to brew something FAST.  Enter: Oktoberfast.  It will be a Marzen/Oktoberfest style very similar to my previous year's batches.  But with the heat of August bearing down I wanted it to be as fast a brewday as possible.  I also need to turn this traditional lager around pretty fast.  So the name works.  And the brewday went swimmingly.

Process: BIAB (Brew-in-a-bag) 10 gallon batch.  No decoctions, no sparging, no extended 90 minutes boils.  Just full volume mashing, squeezing the grain bags and a regular 60 minute boil.  My brewdays for 10 gallon batches usually take 7 to 8 hours (including cleanup).  Yesterday I got it done in 5.5 hours, with a small amount of prep work the night before.  I'll get to the recipe shortly but let me share a pic first:

This is a 32 qt electric canner (I've posted about it before but haven't really employed it in my brewery).  Friday night I filled this with 7 gallons of water and plugged it into a mechanical timer so it kicked on at 3.30am.  By the time I woke up and got to the garage at 6.45am, the 7 gallons was at a gentle rolling boil.  I was able to drain this water into my boil kettle and add room temperature water to get to my desired strike water volume and temperature.  This shaved a solid 45 minutes off my brewday as I didn't have to wait for the water to heat up.

I got out to the garage around 6.45am (again, I had to beat the heat so I started earlier than usual too) and I was already set to dough in.  Here's the recipe:

8# Weyermann German Pils
7# Weyermann Munich I
5# Weyermann Vienna
1# Weyermann Melanoidin

4 grams CaSO4 and 6 grams CaCl added to mash to boost Ca levels and bring pH to ideal range.

45 minutes at ~146F (I had to goose this a little) and then a steady 30 minute rise up to 168F with about 10 minutes spent at 156F.

At mash-out I simply removed the grain bags and squeezed them over a bucket to extract extra wort, put the wort back in the kettle and added about 2.5 gallons of make-up water.  This lack of sparging again shaved about 45 minutes off my brewday.

1.6oz of 6.8% Tradition at 60 minutes
0.6oz of 6.8% Tradition at 20 minutes
Yeast Energizer and Whirlfloc at 15 minutes.

Chill to 55F, hit with O2, and repitch a washed slurry of WLP820 (from a large 'zwickelesque' starter I made two weeks ago) and set in a fermentation chamber set at ~55F.

Clean-up was pretty simple and at 12:15pm I closed down the brewery and got into the house.

With 21# of grain it was much easier to have two grain bags going in the mash..made for a tight squeeze but I hit 80% efficiency so it works.

At mash-out I simply removed the grain bags and squeezed them over a strainer/bucket.

Boil

This Arkansas heat puts chilling to the test.  With ground water temps around 75F, I could only chill the wort to about 90F without wasting a ton of water.  At this point I employed my pond pump inside an igloo cooler with 36 pounds of ice and a couple gallons of water.  This 40F water bath got my wort down another 35F to 55F.  Total chilling time was about 40 minutes.

Humidity, condensing on the side of chilled boiled kettle. 

Dats the color.  Not bad but it's honestly a bit lighter than I expected...

A butterfly came to visit on brew day.  We like to think our little daughter, Everly, will grow to love butterflies so I like to think this a good omen.

Taken by my beautiful wife while I was brewing.  All the Oktoberfast excitement wore out our sweet Evie B

24 hours after pitching there are still not signs of fermentation but I have a smaller jar of wort in the house for a fast ferment and it has achieved high krausen.  So I know the wort is fermentable and I know the yeast is viable.  Things should start moving here in the next few hours.

Oktoberfast for Oktoberfest.  Who will be here to share this beer with us?