Bleep blorp. Since I've been home, I've done a lot of sitting around and doing nothing. Drinking my new beers and smoking my Leedy pipes have been keeping me fairly busy throughout the day, but two days ago I just got so bored I couldn't stand it. Since all my primary buckets were full, I decided to bust out old skool Cramped Space style and brew up a one gallon batch!

I have not done much experimenting when it comes to actual BREWING lately, so I figured I would use the small batch opportunity to try out two things: caramelizing my wort and saving hop flavor/aroma while using my newly adopted no-chill method. What is no-chill? Well, recently I started to genuinely HATE chilling my beer after the boil. Its not fun, it wastes water, and in the summer it takes way too long. So I did some research, and found a process that the Aussies have been doing for quite some time: NO CHILL BREWING! Basically, instead of using an immersion/CFC/plate/what-have-you chiller, you just dump the boiled wort into a food safe bucket, seal it, and let it chill over night. The next morning, dump in the yeast. Since learning about it I have been using it with great success, and I don't plan on ever going back.

The problem with this method is that the hops spend more time than usual at near-boiling temperature, which turns pretty much any hop addition into a bittering addition. Dry-hopping obviously helps with aroma, but I have been having difficulty getting the hop taste back into my beers. Couple this with my desire to make a dark beer the way our ancestors used to before the really dark malts, and I had myself a fun experi-brew-day.

So first things first... BEER
Mashed in. One thing I didn't think about was the difference in thermal mass between a 2 pound grist and a 5-7 pound grist. I tried to mash at 158, but for the life of me I couldn't get it to hold any higher than 150. Lame. I should have done it on the stove like the olden days.

 And added my only bittering hop addition. Set my timer for one hour and let her continue to rip.

At this point, I ran off another quart of wort, got it boiling and measured out .3 oz of Chinook.

I then boiled the Chinook for 5 minutes, then added another .4 oz of Chinook and boiled that for an additional 5 minutes. Then I strained the liquid and put it into the freezer to cool off.
After the boil, all that was left to do was to dump the wort into a Homer bucket and let it chill. With a one gallon batch it only took a few hours to cool down to pitching temps. Then I mixed in the hop mixture, pitched my yeast, and VOILA!