Happy New Year and hope everyone had a Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays. Well this is my first brew of the year and wasn’t really planned. Ended up getting my monthly beer kit in the mail and decided to brew this on Sunday morning. So the night before I ended up milling the grains, gathered the RO water and added in the salts. I setup the Anvil Foundry to preheat the water so in the AM I can get up, gather a cup of coffee and start my dough in.

Woke up the next morning a little earlier and had to wait a few for the water to get up to temperature of 154 F. Once the water hit the 154 F I added in the grains and started the pump to start the mash process for about an hour. At about 30 minutes into the mash to help the conversion, I gave the top 2/3 of the grains a good stir. When I got down to 10 minutes left in the mash I started the Anvil up to 168 F and 100%. Just want to get to the mash out step. Not sure if it really helps but its what I do so I know it doesn’t harm anything so I continue to do it. Let the wort sit at 168 F for about 10 minutes and than I pulled the grain basket and cranked the Anvil up to 212 F at 100%. Let the wort drain for a while with the basket up and down and than after it really slowed down, I would pull the grain basket and put at an angle to finish draining. After a while at the angle an no more dips I would give the bag a good squeeze and than pull it. Once the wort got to about 200 F I would pull my typical 2 cups of hot break and waited for the boil to start. Pulled a pre-boil gravity of 1.045, which is one point higher than expected but also got a lot more wort than expected too, got good conversion.

Once the boil started I added the hops per the recipe. With about 10 minutes left I added in my wort chiller and once the boil was over started the chiller and waited for it to cool down. Pulled a original gravity of 1.047 SF and 5.9 gallons of wort. Once it gets down to the low 100’s F I start to give it a slow swirl to help chill the rest of the way down. Once I got the wort down to about 70 F I transferred over to the fermentation bucket and pitched the A01 House yeast from Imperial. With this brew I had purchased an air pump with HEPA filter and aeration stone and let it pump air for about 2 minutes into the wort. Added the cold crash kit and placed off to the side for the yeast to do there job.