Tumbler Clone Brew Day

For our second home brew, we decided to try for a clone of one of my favorite fall beers - Sierra Nevada Tumbler. It's got a nice malty slightly smokey flavor, and apparently Sierra Nevada isn't brewing it any more. We're doing a three gallon batch this time, mostly to act as a test run for a Christmas beer, which we're also planning for three gallons. Our first beer is still in the secondary, and we don't really have a ton of time between our two trips out of town, but we're fitting in brewing and racking the Tumbler plus bottling the hefeweizen before we head out of town again.

The trip to the brew store was mostly just ingredients this time, but we did pick up a 3 gallon carboy, an airlock, thermometer, irish moss, and priming sugar. Another $100 trip at the home brew store. It'll be a nice little milestone when we brew a beer and actually only buy ingredients.

Brewing the Tumbler involved specialty grains, which we didn't use in the hefeweizen, so the first step was steeping the grains in 1.5 gallons of water at 150 degrees for a half hour. Next we pulled out the bag of grains, put it in a colander, and poured a gallon of water through to sparge. We put the dried malt extract in, stirred it up, then filled the pot to 4 gallons. So we used one of our lessons learned from last time to hit the pre-boil volume with the extract. But, another lesson learned - we should have made that additional water pretty hot first because it took forever to get that 4 gallons up to boiling. We also should have kept the lid on the kettle to get to boiling quicker.

At the end of the boil, we used our mixing spoon as kind of a dip stick to figure out the post-boil volume based on the depth of wort in the pot. It came out to 3.28 gallons for a boil-off rate of 0.72 gal/hour. We also measured the trub left over in the kettle after siphoning to the primary, which came to 4.75 cups. The volume left in the primary (2.98 gal??) was too low for the eventual rack to the secondary, so we added 4 cups of top-up water. Hopefully we now have enough to fill the 3 gallon carboy.

We took a bunch of measurements this time to help calibrate the settings in BeerSmith. Even with that, we got an original gravity of about 1.060 compared to BeerSmith's estimate of 1.051. I don't know if it's underestimating the sugars from steeping the grains, or the extract, or what. Next time I need to measure the gravity after steeping but before adding the extract to see if I can get a more accurate steeping efficiency and extract efficiency in the software. Still, even if our ABV is off by 0.5% or 1%, it's not the end of the world.

Tumbler clone attempt recipe (3 gal batch):
0.40 lbs Chocolate Malt
0.25 lbs Smoked Malt
0.65 lbs Crystal Malt 60 SRM
3.92 lbs Light Dry Extract
13.1 g Challenger hops @ 60 mins
13.1 g Challenger hops @ 15 mins
0.60 tsp Irish Moss @ 15 mins
13.1 g East Kent Goldings hops @ 10 mins
Wyeast American Ale yeast #1056

---> [ Tumbler Bottling ]