It started off as a nice little Sunday. Pleasant breakfast with the family despite my two sons having colds. I set up the brew system and started heating the water for the mash. At this point I still didn’t have a full recipe put together. I had my grain bill set and my yeast starter on the stir plate, but no plans for hops yet. So I set about trying to think about what I had in the fridge that might be fun to use with the HBC-438 (Ron Mexico) hops that I picked up at the National Homebrewers Conference this year.
With a rough idea of pairing some Amarillo and Mosaic with Ron Mexico, I realized I needed to transfer the water needed for the mash to the mash tun before my friend Pete showed up so we could start the brew day promptly. Almost on cue he showed up right as I was getting the transfer set up. We transferred the water and started the recirculation. Everything was going fine so we milled the grain and doughed in.
In my normal process I will add the grain to the mash water at a strike temperature a little higher than my expected mash temperature. The grain will take the temp below my desired mash temperature, but the HERMS system will recover fairly quickly. This is where we started noticing problems. The grain dropped the temperature as expected and started climbing back up as the HERMS system transferred the heat from the hot liquor tank to the mash via the coil. However, the temperature on the HLT started dropping as well.
I thought perhaps the HLT was just struggling today so I stopped the recirculation. I was counting on the large thermal mass of the mash to maintain the temperature we did have while we tried to right the ship with the HLT. We waited a few minutes and the temperature was going nowhere but down. After fiddling with the control panel and futzing with the power cord for the element we determined that the element wasn’t firing, and it appeared to have died. Even plugging it into the boil kettle outlet was getting no action.
So we just stared blankly at each other. He started at me expecting me to know what to do since I was the experience homebrewer. Me staring at him trying to figure out what that course of action would be. First step was to get the mash to temp. We were hovering about 10 degrees low and I wanted to get it to temp as quickly as possible. Using a brewing calculator we figured out that adding a couple gallons of boiling water should get us to our temp. So we pulled my first brew kettle off the storage shelf and ran it upstairs to start heating water on the stove. We added the boiling water and after some extended stirring we hit our mash temp. So I threw on the lid and started the timer.
While the water was boiling we needed to solve the problem of how we were going to sparge. Normally I fly sparge from the HLT but that did not seem like it would be in the cards today. So we figured we could pull off a batch sparge just heating the water in the boil kettle and moving it back to the HLT to just hold there until it was time to sparge. Did I mention that we still needed to figure out our hops? With the mash seemingly stable and a plan in place we finally took the time to figure out when our hops would be added.
When the timer went off for the mash we discovered we lost a lot more temp than we expected. I had figured 24 pounds of grain and 11 gallons of water would have held its temperature pretty well over the course of 40 minutes, but we lost 8 degrees. My system is not designed for holding temperatures in a static environment. I don’t have insulation on the kettles, but that seems like a lot of temperature loss for that amount of thermal mass on a hot summer day.
Following the batch sparge, we found that our pre-boil gravity was almost 20 points too low. All of our mash shenanigans caused us to miss horribly. I had used the last of my malt extract to make my starter for this batch so we were stuck. We started the boil and through in our first hop addition without accounting for the smaller amount of sugars. I was being stubborn even though I knew I should lower the bitterness level and readjust to call this a pale ale.
As we were sitting and waiting for our first flavor/aroma hop addition, Pete pointed at a small container sitting near my brew stand and asked what it was. Turns out it was a container of honey that I had forgot to put into a previous batch of beer. We now had 2 pounds of sugar at our disposal to fix our gravity problem! We added all of the sugar and it got us much closer, but we still stayed about 8-10 points low of our expected gravity.
After the boil and 3 oz of Mosaic in the Hop Rocket we had some wort. Whether or not it will turn into anything worthwhile. Normally, this is where I would put the recipe. I’m not. Although the fermenters smell promising, only time will tell. If it turns out alright I’ll post some tasting notes and include the recipe with my best approximations for recreating it. If not, I’ll try to get my hands on some more Ron Mexico and give it another go.
But this still leaves me with the fact that I am short one working element in my homebrew system. Outside the heat of the moment I was able to take my time stepping through the issue. After some more fiddling I did get the element to turn on using the boil kettle wiring. So that isolated my problem to somewhere in the control panel for the HLT.
Tracing all my wiring and checking all my fuses left me with no answers. Fuses were still in tact and none of the wiring seemed to have melted or had anything else go awry. Out of frustration I poked one of the wires between the relay and the fuse and asked it, “why won’t you turn on?” There may have been another word or two thrown in there, but saying earmuffs doesn’t work in a textual format.
Low and behold the wire and its connection at the relay moved when I poked it. All along I had a loose wiring connection at the relay and it had finally moved enough to not complete the connection. I quickly tightened the screw and checked the other connections (all okay). I fired up the HLT again and it worked! A new lesson learned. I need to check my wiring connections from time to time and make sure nothing has loosened up.
In the end I could not have asked for a better solution to the problem. Prior to getting the element to fire using the boil kettle wiring I was already dreading replacing the element and having to do all the leak testing again to make sure I had a snug fit. Bottom line: I can brew again. And if this batch doesn’t turn out, I may need that ability sooner than later.