Greetings from North Carolina

[RokDok]

On 2/22/2021 at 9:51 PM, GrillnBrew said:

Have you ever tried smoking your malt for a rauchbier or other smoked beer using your KK?  I smoked a couple pounds of 2-row with cherry wood, and made a smoked porter which was really nice.  Now I'm wondering if I need to pick up the cold smoker when I order my grill....

Well GB, I've only had my 32 for 3 or 4 weeks now, so it's been steaks & duck breasts thus far. Going to do the rotisserie and use the Meater for the first time at the weekend. Haven't even looked at the smoker yet, but we have apple and cherry trees in the garden - they'll need a bit of surgery soon so I'll have wood to smoke.

So, haven't smoked any grain, and I can't truly remember if I've ever had Rauchbier, but I have kilned / roasted oats with apple wood in my WFO to make Oatmeal Stout.

I did wonder (fleetingly) whether it would be possible to kiln home malted barley in the KK - if it did overdo you could always do an overnight mash with a bit of pale malt to provide the enzymes.

However, a few years ago I got a bag of barley from a local farmer and malted it at home in plastic containers. That worked well and I thought that the kilning would be relatively straightforward. The chitted grain was fairly wet and I put it in metal trays in the ovens of our range overnight.

Next morning Mrs RD came down to make the tea and the stone floor surrounding the cooker was a lake of thick, brown, sticky sludge.

The interior of the ovens were similarly coated.

When I inadvertently leant on the oven door to clean it out I broke the spring so the door wouldn't close.

The engineer came out - the spring was truly broken and there were no spares available so had to go to a specialist spring maker.

Because the malt was still a bit damp it wouldn't go through the grain mill so I had to use my industrial meat mincer and even then it was touch and go.

I used the stream water, hops from the garden and cultured yeast from the apples in the garden and added some hedgerow berries to some for good measure.

Three years down the line and it tastes interesting - the bottles with the wild apple yeasts definitely taste Gauze-like.

I'd get away with smoking some malt - but I think the flashbacks would need to resolve a bit more before I tried home malting again.

 

[tony b]

What an ugly mess that had to have been, and to break the stove on top of it. I'm surprised Mrs RD will even let you near the kitchen again! 

I was an partial extract brewer (mini-mashes) for many, many years. As another experienced brewer told me, "why spend hours trying to mash 10 pounds of 2-row, with all kinds of possible hiccups (like stuck mashes), when you can buy the base dry extracts for your brews - same results every time, no hassles." Made perfectly good sense to me. But you took this to a whole another level, in the opposite direction, trying to malt your own grains. An interesting experiment, one time, but wouldn't be something that I'd want to do on a routine basis.  

[Paul]

On 2/23/2021 at 12:49 PM, GrillnBrew said:

but I have to see how CA and the rest of the country is doing before a cross country flight.

Here in Nor Cal public schools are opening Monday, March 1st. 

[GrillnBrew]

Received my shipping emails this morning, so my BB 32 is finally on the road!  Have not called the shipping company yet to see what my ETA is, but I may be cooking by Memorial Day!

I will have the delivery person put the grill in my garage, then I will need to figure out how to best get the grill into my backyard.  My front yard is levelish, but there is a slope into the backyard and through a gate.  I'm thinking either use the plywood leapfrog method and roll it on the casters, and maybe tie a strap to the grill to help ease it down the hill.  Other option is to rent a pallet jack and do the same thing while the grill is still on the base of the crate, which would eliminate any stress on the casters. I will need to measure the base of the crate to make sure it will fit through my gate before I decide on that route.  Either way, expect more questions and some pictures in the next week or so.