Thursday, October 13, 2016

Canning Wort For Starters



I'm sure this is a subject blogged/vlogged about multiple times but since this was my first experience with the process I'll just write a bit about it.

I had a planned brewed day last Friday, I was going to brew a Barleywine. This changed because I wanted to get some wort canned and I wanted to get another use out the WLP002 before kicking the shit out of it with a Barleywine.

Anyway I wanted this to be an easy drinker with an O.G. of 1.045 so I could also harvest some wort for future starters. This is what I did.

  1. Adjust the recipe to make an extra gallon for canning. Beersmith made this a snap, I just scaled the existing recipe then reset my hop additions to what they were originally (we're going to be removing the extra gallon before hopping begins).
  2. Mash and batch sparge as usual then start the boil.
  3. Once the wort had boiled about 10 minutes and before adding any hops I filled each jar using the jar clamp canning accessory tool I purchase with my pressure cooker. Since I was using a pressure cooker to can rather than a liquid bath I didn't need to pre-sanitize my jars, everything would be killed in the cooker.
  4. I placed a lid on each jar and lightly screwed the ring down. This allows the jars to vent before eventually sealing on cool down. 
  5. I pressure cooked at 15psi for 20 minutes then allowed the cooker to cool for 1.5 hours before removing the lid and testing each jar for a seal. I had one that didn't seal and I think it's because it fell over against the side of the cooker and knocked the lid slightly off. I had a different size jars in the cooker plus my slants so I'm not surprised they moved around a bit.

Anyways this was a very simple process and didn't add any time to my brew day and I now have 3 1L starters worth of wort ready to go . It always killed me to pay $15 for 3lbs of DME, You might get 5 1L starters from that much DME. It might cost me $3 in extra grain to get the same thing from wort, that's pretty good savings over time.

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