Stupid is as Stupid Does . . . A SMaSH Beer

Using a decoction to fix screw-up # 2

Its brew day again; a mere 7 days since last time.  The saison is fermenting along fine, the sour barleywine is growing a pellicle, the hopsteader is gone, and the son of gnarly is almost out.  So my beer is either gone, is nearly gone, or is a long ways away from being done.  What is a brewer to do?  Brew another long-ageing beer!

OK, that’s dumb, but this beer is part of a group-brew with other members of the London Homebrewers Guild.  This time, we’re doing SMaSH beers – Single Malt and Single Hop.  It is exactly what it sounds like – you brew a beer using nothing but a base malt and a single hop.  In our case, we drew a malt and a hop out of a hat . . . I drew Munich malt & Citra hops.

I decided to brew a bastardized Munich Dunkel; instead of classical European hops there would be Citra; in place of classical lager yeasts there would be a steam-beer like yeast (WLP810, San Francisco).  This is a half-batch using a single-step mash; should have been an easy brew day.  I had tentatively named this “MC SMaSH”.  Yes, that’s corny as hell, but MC = Munich Citra, and I’ve been listening to a lot of my old beastie boys albums lately…

And then brew day arrived and everything began going wrong:

1. Lost the cat (he suck out of the garage, and down the street).  In chasing him I thought I had over-heater the strike water,
2. Started the mash, then realized my strike water was just over mash temp (66C), not strike temp (75C).  Undershot the desired 66.7C mash temp by nearly 10C.
3. Decocted twice to get back upto mash temp; burnt the second decoction.
4. Mash runoff gravity was poor – 1.028 instead of 1.041
5. OG was 1.035, not 1.054