Back in January, I was wondering what our club could do for National Homebrew day, scheduled for May 6, 1995. I hit upon the idea of trying to establish a record for most beer made by a single homebrew club in a single day. I broached the subject with the club's Overlord, and he gave the green light. Due to my own circumstance, I had to drop out of the planning for this mega-brew-a-thon, but the club was enthusiastic enough to continue with the plans without my assistance. I have to report that the event was a great success!
The earliest brewers got to the site at Larry's Brewing Supply at a coffee demanding 4 am, and fired up the pre-positioned kettles. By the time that I got down there, the party was in full swing. There were perhaps 15 kettles of various sizes in varying stages of use. Three of these kettles were made from converted food grade 55 gallon drums! The next larger kettles tended to be about 25-35 gallons in size. Then came the converted keg sized kettles. During my time there, there was even a 3.5 gallon stock pot used by one member for an extract and dilute brew! It was quite a party... It was very interesting to see the different equipment types in use by the members. There were several interesting designs for sparging and wort cooling gadgets, and a lot of different stand designs. For the newer, less experienced members, there was a lot of stuff to see, and a lot of stuff to learn.
Some of the local micro-breweries, including Big-Time ales, Pacific Maritime, the Levenworth Brewery, Pike Place, and others, were kind enough to donate a rather large quantity of yeast slurry, so having enough starter wasn't a problem. A 'fridge was set up to hold individual pitching packets of the slurry for use throughout the day. A water station was set up with a water filter on one line, and perhaps 5 output lines. The ground got very wet indeed with one or more of these hoses running more or less constantly for various reasons. A sanitizing station was set up, with an Idophor solution made available for cascading from one fermenter to another. Members of the informed public, as well as members of other clubs came by with their fermenters, queing up to buy ready to ferment wort. Homebrew flowed freely (don't tell the Washington State Liquor Control Board, please!) as members shared high points and low points of their brewing history. A barbeque grill was fired up in the afternoon for obvious purposes, and a spontaneous potluck early dinner erupted. At a peak, there were over 40 people in a mad scramble for kettle space, wort transfer, water hose time, sanitizing solution, hop bags, yeast starter, and grill space. It was quite a party!
And the record? The Impaling Alers of Kent Washington is proud to claim the one day homebrewing record of an amazing 781.5 gallons of beer and mead! The breakdown of this amazing achievement is as follows:
433 gallons of all extract only beer
80 gallons of extract and grain beer
263.5 gallons of all grain beer
5 gallons of mead
About 40 members signed up on an advance list of brewers (although no count of actual attendees and participants was ever made)
There were 3 50 gallon kettles, each was used twice, for 6 50 gallon batches
The effort consumed the following quantities of supplies:
668 lbs of malt extract and honey
317.5 lbs of 2-row and pale malt
88 lbs of munich and vienna malt
53 lbs of various crystal malts
18 lbs of wheat malt
12.5 lbs of chocolate, roast, and black malt
224.5 oz of hops, both leaf and pellet
7.5 oz of hop extract
116 thai peppers (there were several batches of chili beer made!)
2 lbs of spruce tips
The Impaling Alers now challenge the WORLD to meet and beat our record. It was a hellofa lotta fun, and we encourage you to try it at your club!
Copyright 1997 by Rich Webb, aka The Outsider.
This page is authored and maintained by Rich Webb.You can send E-mail to me by following this link to the contact page. And feel free to contact me if you have any comments, criticisms, or suggestions. I remain, however, perfectly capable of ignoring your useless opinion...
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