Our Malt Liquor Brewday at Sunken City Brewing Co - Warning: Lots of Pictures

Back in June I was speaking with Jeremy over at Sunken City Brewing and he asked me to come in and brew on their pilot system.  At the time he jokingly asked me to come up with a recipe for a malt liquor and I obliged.  For logistical reasons, a lager wasn't in the cards for that brew and we wound up brewing an ESB, one of my favorite styles.  Well, now that the weather has turned cool we can turn our attention to lagers.

So, I present to you Dam Buster Malt Liquor

First, the recipe for our 13 gallon batch:

11.5 lbs 2-Row Brewer's Malt
11.5 lbs 6-Row Brewer's Malt
4.75 lbs Flaked Corn
2.75 lbs Flaked Rice
13.5 oz Weyermann Carahell

1 oz Cascade @ 60 minutes
1 oz Mandarina Bavaria @ 10 minutes

White Labs WLP840 American Lager yeast

Now for the pictures:

This is Sunken City's pilot system.  It is a Sabco Brew Magic capable of brewing 13 gallon batches for testing recipes or for providing beer to their attached taproom.

As you can see, we're pretty close to to the top with our mash. This is a bit over 31 pounds of grains.

Pretty flame on the Sabco burner.

The Sabco system is dwarfed by Sunken City's production brew kettles.

Draining the first runnings in to the boil kettle

The sparge.  We're pretty close to capacity with over 30 pounds of grain.

The first taps came out to 19.6 Plato

Malt, flaked corn, flaked rice and rice hulls stripped of their sugars.

Filling the kettle. We'll be starting with 14.5 gallons and a few drops of Fermcap-S to prevent boil overs.

Our combined first taps and sparge at full kettle. We came in at 15.2 Plato.

Look at how white that foam is. We are about to add our 60 minute hop addition, 1 ounce of Cascade.

After the 60 minute hop addition I ran over to a grocery store and picked up some commercial examples of the style we were brewing.

The boil is just about over. We added 1 ounce of Mandarina Bavaria at 10 minutes.

Here is Seth checking the final gravity before we transfer from the kettle to the fermenter.

Our final gravity came in at 16.5 Plato, which is about 1.068 SG.

We'll transfer from the kettle via a pump and plate chiller. This transfers and cools the wort down in minutes.

Transferring the wort to the fermenter. This is what the wort looks like before fermentation. From here the wort will be chilled even further in the walk in cooler before Seth pitches the White Labs WLP840 American Lager yeast.

Seth and I both finished the Steel Reserve, but the King Cobra got dumped.

This is the brew log filled out for our malt liquor. These are the notes that the pros take.

Usually I will print out a copy of my recipe and just scribble notes on it as I'm brewing.

Thanks for checking out our brew day.  Hopefully you'll be able to sample our work in January!

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