TnDC Field Trip #21 Brew Day at BlackStone

>0500hrs came early this morning, finally arrived at BS at 0600hrs to brew with Red. Today's batch is Nut Brown Ale and the teacher has officially become the student! Mashing in (aka Getting our Mash on) has become my new favorite upper body workout and the steam has done wonders for my pores. May refer to it as getting a brewer's facial from here on out:) To go with brewer's jacuzzi.
>Mashed for an hour now we recirculate, through a grant to aid in clarifying the wort and pack the grain bed. The "tea" tastes great already. I've also been subjected to cleaning the yeast/perlite cake off of the filter. It's like scraping gooey talcum powder. Wonder if that's a newbie task?
> Let the sparging begin, Red's adding about 100 gallons to our 800lb grain concoction to pull the last tasty remnants out of the malt.
>And the boil begins, with just over 2000 grams of Willamette jumping in the kettle, followed by some super moss and zinc sulfate
>Just tried the Rye IPA and after only the slightest sip 2 sneezes came violently. It's a great piney nose with an evenly distributed bitterness across the sides of the tongue
>1305hrs And a trip through the heat exchanger on the way to the fermenter will complete the process
>Now the Texas Brown Ale to finish our day, pours a great dark brown from the use of molasses and brown sugar, the nose is appreciable different from RIPA above in that it is more grapefruit and citrus from the Centennial/Cascade combo