BrewDay 04/11/20 - Plinian Progeny (Northern Brewer recipe)

It is now Brew Day + 2 and fermentation is going hard! The beer I brewed is actually a recipe from Northern Brewer called Plinian Progeny. It is a higher-grav, higher-hopped take on the classic Pliny the Elder. This beer served as a procedural and technical challenge for me and my equipment.

I use a Grainfather as my brew system. The absolute maximum grainbill for this system is 20lb, but that is a stretch. Dough balls are a serious issue at that quantity, and so is mash consistency. Running 20lb in the tub ends with lower efficiencies than I like.

This grainbill was a 21lb recipe, so I used a technique called a re-iterated mash. In an RI brew you mash about half of the grains with an adjusted water volume, sparge the grains, dump them, and then load the remaining grains for their mash and sparge until you hit your pre-boil volume. Efficiency is still a concern here, but not as much as overloading the mash tun.

I was targeting a 1.090 OG, but ended right at 1.080. pH was a perfect 5.3, so there's not much reason to be unhappy! This beer will go through a 2-stage fermentation with a substantial amount of dry-hopping towards the end. Look forward to it!