10 Gallon Brews!!!

Since the last post, we have made fine use out of our 15 gallon kettle.  The weather finally cooperated... We were able to get outside and use the propane burner with our 15 gal. kettle. It worked out extremely nice. We were able to boil the wort down to 10 gallons and not have to add the additional water to the carboys like we normally do with the 5 gal. kettle.

The first brew with that kettle was for AHA's big brew back in May. We beefed up their English Dark Mild recipe from a 5 gal. batch to a 10.5 gal. batch. Unfortunately, I was't able to attend the inaugural brew of that kettle, but here are some pictures the other guys took.

The other 10 gal. batch we brewed a couple weeks later was the Sierra Madre kit from Northern Brewer. We took the 5 gal. recipe and doubled it to 10 gal. The brew went great.  I did forget to connect the kettle screen to the ball valve coupling inside the boil kettle, but it worked out. Most of the trub stayed inside the bottom of the kettle once we got to the point of transferring the wort to the carboys. A few pics of the brew session below.

Chilling the wort before transferring it to the carboys in the background

Since we brewed 10 gallons we divided the wort between two carboys, 5 gallons each. We used the same yeast for both, so Brian figured we should use a couple ounces of Cascade hops to dry hop one of the secondary carboys.  Looking forward to see how all these beers turn out!