I'm brewing this beer while also watching my son by myself, so the brewing session is getting tweaked a bit. I mashed in right at my target of 158, and after dough-in I didn't open the tun until the full hour had passed. I did this to see how well some of my cooler modifications worked to hold temperature. After 60 minutes I had a temperature drop of only 2 degrees! I will write another post to cover what I did, since before extra insulation my mash would drop 6 to 8 degrees per hour.
I did all my water volume and temperature calculations using Mash Water 3.3. After mashing for 60min at 158-6, I batch sparged. My typical batch sparge consists of a mashout (add boiling water), vorlauf, sparge, and then add the remaining sparge water, vorlauf, and do the second sparge. I started my mash at 6:00, and finished my batch sparge at 7:30. Nice and quick.
Here's where things get tricky. I sparged into 2 "Ale Pales" and had to leave the wort for awhile while I played with my son and got him ready for bed. So far so good, now it's 9:30 and I'm in the driveway boiling some wort, having a beer, enjoying Fall, and life is really good. Thank you God, seriously, thank you.
At 10:30 I threw the "20 minute" hops into the kettle after turning the burner off. I put the lid on the kettle and put it in the garage to cool for a day. I pitched one package of US-05 about 24 hours later, and had fementation activity by 7:30am.
I noticed upon transferring the beer into my carboy that it was still very cloudy. Then I remembered the Irish Moss, about 24.5 hours too late. So this may turn out to be a cloudy beer. I've never had a beer with so little trub on the bottom of the kettle.
I had trouble tasting the beer while I was transferring since I have a cold.
While I was shaking the carboy to aerate it I noticed that not much air was diffusing into the wort. I've noticed that when I chill quickly and then shake the carboy with an airlock on it that it bubbles in reverse as air goes into solution, and this time I didn't get much of that. It seems like a beer that cools in an unsealed container would allow air (including oxygen) to diffuse in over the cooling period, so I didn't do much shaking and fermentation activity looks good so far. O.G. was 1.045 so it shouldn't have much trouble fermenting out even if the aeration was less than optimal.
On Tuesday Oct. 6th I moved the fermenter from my 66 degree basement to the colder garage. Nights have been getting colder here and I'm trying to get all the haze I can to precipitate. It still looks pretty cloudy though (on October 13th). Note that I do not use a secondary. I plan to bottle it October 15th.
October 22 - Filled 55 bottles with primed beer. I add 0.5oz of table sugar per gallon per volume of CO2, and since my beer was at ~50degrees I added 1.3 volumes of CO2 (since 50 degree beer already contains 1.2 volumes of CO2).
At bottling time the beer was cloudy, with little to no hop aroma and a very faint hop flavor. Overall bitterness was low. It was full bodied but not sweet at all, and actually tasted slightly tart. I think I could taste the rye, but overall flavor perception was quite low. When I was drinking some of the primed beer I could also taste the peach flavor that Jamil Z. says US-05 can produce. I'm hoping for the flavor to be a bit brighter once it carbonates and then clears (after extra time in the fridge to drop the haze).
