First attempt at washing yeast

After finishing moving the porter from the fermenter to a keg for secondary, I decided that since my next brew is a California Common, I'd try washing the yeast and repitching it since they both use the WYeast California Lager 2112. I found an article on the HBD web site about washing yeast and decided it sounded simple enough. Thing is, I was expecting the yeast to look as it does coming out of the smack pack or vial. What I thought was leftover beer that I poured DOWN THE SINK was actually the yeast I was trying to harvest in suspension. Fortunately, there was still enough left (but man, there was a LOT of trub - I was using pellet hops, and didn't use a hop bag) to successfully harvest about a half liter, then added an old smack pack of WY2112 for good measure. Added to that 1/4 tsp yeast nutrient and hopefully we're off to the races with this.

Out of primary, into secondary

Last gravity sample out of the fermenter after chilling to get the trub to drop out. Gravity got down to 1.016, which isn't too bad for a higher gravity beer, from what I've read. Has some nice roasted malt and chocolaty notes to it, slight bitterness, which based on a recipe IBU of around 40 seems about right. Hopefully my wife will enjoy this because it was brewed at her request.

Survey Porter - Brewed 05/20/2007

I've decided to try to keep track of what I've been doing here and hopefully someone will find my mistakes of use in their own brewing process. I've found resources too numerous to count on-line that have helped me out in the past few years, so why not put it out there?

This brew was a first for a number of reasons: first high-gravity beer (over 1.060), first step mash, and first time using my HERMS setup. I did discover that the HERMS coil in the HLT was too short, which reduced the wort contact with heat, which greatly increased my step times, but it's a trial and error kind of deal. I had a lot of help from the AHA Tech Talk forum with the apparent design flaws with my HERMS setup. Turned out I was just getting air in the pumps and needed a way to bleed them.