Scott Ickes
Grandmaster Brewer
Roadrocket said:Scott, that sounds great. I wish I could be there, I'd buy you a beer.
Practical demonstrations are a sure way to get people interested. I know everybody at the festival will be impressed with your knowledge and enthusiasm. Good luck with it and I hope you and Brewmex41 have a great time.
Thank you for the kind words.
Domingo and I did brew this Collarboration Porter at the Vancouver Brewfest yesterday. I think I'm the last one to brew it up. Domingo brewed his a few months back and entered it in a competition and I think it scored very respectably! I don't remember what his score was though. He'll have to chime in with that.
We hit all of our numbers dead on, except we were slightly short on volume. I was hoping for 5.5 gallons into the fermenter at 1.067. I had 5 gallon at 1.067. It was quite warm by the time we started boiling, so I think my boil off took more water out than usual. Still, if we'd have been at 5.5 gallons, we would have missed gravity low, so all in all, I'm pretty happy with it.
Here's a photo of myself (in the gray shirt) and one of our club members (Ryan Murphy) using his portable ice batch immersion chiller system to cool the wort down. We got from boiling to 70F in 15 minutes. He has a submersible pump that hooks up to the immersion chiller. He fills the chest full of ice and about 2 gallons of cold water (just enough to get things started). The first gallon of ice water is pumped through the chiller and into the sparge boil pot and this gets rid of the hottest water. Then the discharge end of the immersion chiller gets moved from the sparge pot to the cooler full of ice and water and just goes in a circle. It's very, very efficient. There was still ice floating in the cooler when we finished.
Domingo had to leave before I thought to take a photo. We hand crushed the grains on his barley crusher (we forgot a drill). He was a beast turning that handle. Oh, to be young again! We had a nice crowd around during the mash and boil. Fort Vancouver TV interviewed myself and our club president (Tyler Ward) later in the evening. It was a great day!
Today the club is doing an extract brewing demo (Ryan and Tyler) of a Pale Ale at the Brewfest. We set up a corn hole game behind our tent and that thing was busy all day long!
Our club also reached an agreement in principle to brew up a batch on one of the local Brew Pubs systems for next years event. So, next year our club will have a beer on tap at our tent and also on tap at that local Brew Pub. I'll wait until we finalize the details about who we're brewing with, so that they can do any advertising and promotion on our collaboration. It will probably be called some type of collaboration name for the beer, since we'll be collaborating with them on this. They've won some awards for their beers already (a newer brewery), so we're excited to have our club brew on a professional system at an award winning brewery! I think they're giving us complete control over the recipe design too, so that's makes it even more exciting. We've been doing the research, so that we're obeying all of the state laws on this for next year.
All in all, we've had a great weekend so far and will probably have about a dozen new club members at next months meeting. We picked up about 20 new members after last years Brewfest.