Our last batch of brew, while tasty, looked a little cloudy. That’s not cool. You can’t really share a nice IPA and tell someone, “Uh, don’t worry about the way it looks. It’s really good.” Just doesn’t work. The other option is to make sure they drink it out of the bottle, which is usually OK. In any case, we decided to take the next step up and build a mash tun. Think about it logically:

You need something to collect the liquid, while straining out the mash.
You need to keep the temperature fairly constant during this time.

I saw directions online to build a mash tun out of a water cooler, and it seemed fairly straight forward. Turns out it was.

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Well, now that I have a new mash tun, I have to go an use it, right? This time I came up with the following, with some help from Nick at The Brew Hut:

Here’s the mash tun in action!

After about 10 days, our SG is at 1.014, and we’re ready to go. We’ll dry hop with Galaxy. Look how clear it is!

About a week later, FG is 1.012 and we’re ready to bottle. Yeah! (Looks like we ended up at about 7.5%)

Until next time!