So without further explanation, here's a first crack at it:
- [24 hours ahead of brew day] Prepare my yeast starter
- [24 hours ahead of brew day] Freeze the chill stick (I work in the restaurant industry at my day job...)
- Get all of my ingredients and necessary equipment together
- Fill the fermentor with sanitizer and sanitize the transfer hose, airlock, carboy bung, and oxygenation rig
- Get my instruction sheet out (seriously)
- Fire up the ten gallon kettle with a spigot and fill with 6.5 gallons of distilled or reverse osmosis water
- Treat with Gypsum or Calcium Chloride only to accentuate bitterness or malt flavor, not to adjust pH. (Extract removes the need to worry about this.)
- Steep the specialty grains while heating the brewing water up to a boil. (140F for 10-20 minutes. Although exact time and temp don't matter that much from what I understand.)
- Ramp up to boil with my weak-ass gas range (It take two of the burners to get the ten gallon pot rolling.)
- Add fermcap
- Add the extract and hops per my recipe, making sure to add whirlfloc at 15 minutes
- Kill the heat and whirlpool with the chill stick for about 15 minutes
- Take a gravity reading and adjust for wort temperature
- Transfer 5.5 gallons to the fermentor
- Add more fermcap
- Oxygenate for 15-30s, depending on the gravity of the beer
- Pitch the starter once the wort has cooled to roughly 64F
- Seal it up and drop it in the fermentation fridge, racking a small sample into a test jar with a hydrometer in it for watching the gravity.
- Keep the temperature steady for the first 72 hours and then ramp up the temperature up 4-6 degrees F during the last 25% of fermentation. If the recipe calls for dry hopping, this is the time to do it.
- Once fermentation is complete, let the beer sit for a few days at the final temperature, then cold crash in the fermentor to 34F.
- Let the beer sit for another 1-2 weeks on the yeast to let them do some further diacetyl cleanup and the other good work they do.
- Rack 5 gallons of "bright" beer to a corny keg and force carbonate with CO2 to get to an appropriate level for the style.
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