The recipe will follow, approximately, Charlie Papazian's recipe for Good Life Pale Ale on p295 of the Complete Joy of Home Brewing (the Bible) but of course with some variations. Firstly I like to brew 30l of beer at a time so the barrel I currently have is full and during the first initial fermentation the foam, containing nasty overly bitter compounds, is blown out of the top. Charlie's recepies all are designed for 20l so I always add a bit. Usually this means part grain and part extract, the extract just being enough to boost the volume to 30l without reducing the OG too much.
Yeast Starter
WYeast 1098 British Ale, opened on Tuesday (today is Saturday). It didn't expand much, I'm worried it may be too old as it was manufactured in May 2006.
Starter was made of 1l water boiled with 7 tbsp of light malt extract, cooled, and mixed with the yeast in a 2l conical flask with fermentation lock. 12 hours later there's no visible fermentation, there should be some activity, I'm sure.
Recipe
To make 30l beer:
5Kg Pale Ale malt
1Kg Munich malt
100g Crystal malt (to use it up)
1.6Kg Bernstein malt extract can
50g Fuggles hops (60 minutes boiling)
30g East Kent Goldings hops (30 minutes boiling)
30g East Kent Goldings hops (3 minutes boiling)
1 tsp gypsum
Method
The grains they are ground and will go in a grain bag in a borrowed brew pot and follow the following temperature steps:
- 10.5l water heated to 63C, add gypsum, grains and hold at 56C for 30 mins.
- Start heating 5l water in another pan. Note this is a mistake in the book!
- Add another 5l boiling water, make sure temperature is now 68C and hold at 69C for 30 to 45 minutes.
- Start heating another 10l water.
- Raise just slightly to 70C and hold 10 to 20 mins until an iodine test indicates complete conversion.
- Raise temperature again to 75C and separate grains from wort.
- Flush grains with 10l boiling water.
- Combine wort and water flushed from grains in brew pot and bring to boil.
- Start 10l water boiling again for extract.
- Add boiling hops 1 when grain wort is boiling, wait 30 minutes.
- Add boiling hops 2 and boil 20 minutes more
- Add finishing hops 3 and boil 3 minutes.
- Remove hops and cool to 21-24C.
- Pitch yeast and hope it has all worked....
9.00am Yeast starter is active. This is a very encouraging start, and probably because I heated the room it was in to 22C to 24C.
10.30am started heating water
11.10am water reached 63C, added grains in grain bag. This works well, but when wet the bag is heavy and not easy to get a good flow of water through it.
11.45am added 10l boiling water, temperature now 74C, too hot! Wondering why, noticed mistake in the book, this should have been 5l water. I corrected the recipe above.
12.25pm Started heating to 70C
12.45pm Conversion complete! Something of a miracle as the temperature was not stable during the previous steps. Looks good.
13.15pm Heating to boil.
13.45pm Boil started. Boiling extract and wort separately, but balanced pans to contain approx same volume. Added boiling hops some to each pan.
14.15pm Added flavour hops only to grain wort
14.40pm Added aroma hops only to grain wort
14.45pm Boil complete Scooped hops out with sieve, started cooling in bath.
Post Mortem
Generally it all went very well. The yeast seemed to come alive just in time which was perhaps because I moved it to the bathroom at 24C. The cooking was flawless and the starch conversion iodine test indicated completion very quickly, which was nice. The cooling procedure needs some work, this didn't go well.
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