For those of you that made it down to Raccoon River, yesterday was a spectacular success. With a great flurry of activity, I setup my brewing rig inside the brewery at Raccoon River, and proceeded to get things started. It seems that my mash tun was damaged on the trip over, and began leaking profusely during my cleaning and testing of the system. Dave had a spare cooler available, and I quickly set to converting it into a mash tun. After that debacle the brew day went surprisingly well. Start to finish in under six hours. It’s a whole different brewday when you’ve 500 gallons of 200 degree water available to you. With the hop market the way it is, when Dave offered up some hops I gladly took him up on the offer. I went a little overboard, and used 5 ounces of Centennial in the brew. I wanted to really get a feel for this hop, and I suppose if you’re going to go, go big. I used the brown ale recipe below, and changed up the hop additions: 2 ounces and 60 min, 1 ounce at 30 min, 1 ounce at 15 min, and 1 ounce at 5 min.