Brewing Number XII

Number 11 will be a light summer ale for our summer party. Recipe was found on the internet and then modified to my own creation. I'm after something light colour and flavour with gentle hops.

The method will be slightly different - I will do the mash in a plastic bucket and insulate it with a blanket to hold the temperature. A slight departure from the normal route but will be easier to do if it works.

Ingredients

5Kg pale ale malt 7EBC
1Kg cara-pils malt 5EBC
500g malted wheat 3EBC
1tsp gypsum
1tsp Irish moss
Hops
37g Fuggles 4.1% alpha boiling hops
30g East Kent Goldings 6.1% alpha aroma hops
Note both hops are old and lacking character.

Method

1. 09:30am Heated 10l water to 70C, too hot, 65 is enough.
2. 11.10am Drained into plastic bucket wrapped in a blanket with malts crushed and in grain bag, adjusted temperature with 1l water, reached approx 56C
   
3. Started heating 6l water to approx boiling. The mash is about the right temperature it seems.
   
4. 11:42am added 5l water at 90C to grains, it seems this did not get the mash hot enough, it never reached the required 69C, apparently.
   
5. 1:24pm Problem - temperature dropped too low so conversion is not complete, heated the liquid on the cooker in 3l pans and returned to grains, now at around 70C so should convert OK. I hope.
6. 1:52pm Conversion still not complete, iodine still cloudy. Colour of beer looks about right, but will it ferment...
7. 2:15pm Looks like I made a mess of it, conversion not complete according to iodine test, start boil anyway.
8. 3:00pm Boil starting, add Fuggles hops.
9. 4pm final hops added and let to sit for a moment, begin cooling
10. 5pm cooled to 25C in the barrel. OG as measured just after brewing was 1060 so I added 6l water to bring it down to 1040ish. Will pitch yeast now and clear up.

Review of brewing - everything seemed fine except the iodine test didn't work properly. Will have to review the temperatures, I think I did everything right and I've read on the net that sometimes a false negative (and also false positives) are possible so perhaps I'm lucky...

A Useful Address

Good grief, is it 2009 already?

While visiting Dave the other weekend we stopped off at his local homebrew shop near his place in Hampshire (lucky thing him, having a shop nearby) and they have the all elusive malt, Maris Otter, so check them out on www.the-home-brew-shop.co.uk.

Sadly it looks like the delivery costs will kill this idea, unless I can bring a sack back myself.

Tasting Number XI

Fantastic, just what I was aiming for, vigorous fermentation ended Monday and all is quiet now and I have 20+ litres of golden brown beer. With 3 more weeks to soften it will be great.

Measured final gravity at 1014@20C, will do the alcohol calculations another day.

Brewing Number XI

Number XI will be a winter beer for a new year's eve party, brewed along the same lines as Adnams Broadside.

4kg Pale malt
500g Munich malt
70g Black malt
1 tsp gypsum

Boiling Hops
Start of boil:
Challenger 39g
Fuggles 34g
Goldings 14g

Last fifteen minutes:
Fuggles 12g
Irish moss 12g

Yeast - WYeast 1968 propagator London ESB from 21APR08

Following the same method as number 7

1. 10l water heated to 63C
2. 13:30 Added the milled grains and gypsum and hold at 56C for 30 mins.
3. 13:55 Start heating 5l water in another pan.
4. 14:00 Add the 5l boiling water, make sure temperature is now 68C and hold at 69C for 30 to 45 minutes.
5. 14:45 Raise just slightly to 70C and hold 10 to 20 mins until an iodine test indicates complete conversion.
6. 15:00 Start heating another 5l water for flushing grains.
7. 15:10 Raise temperature again to 75C and separate grains from wort. Flush grains with hot/boiling water.
8. 15:30 Conversion complete, grains washed using white plastic barrel, worked well actually. Heating to boil started.
   
9. Put the hops in the grain bag for a trial, should be easier than filtering the hops from the liquid later.
10. 16:00 Boil started.
11. 17:30 Boil finished.
12. Measured OG at 1054@20C, really I should do this before the boil as I guess it doesn't change much. Diluted with 6l cold water after cooling, final temperature 23C, yeast pitched.
13. 18:30 All done for the beer, clearing up started for another half hour.

In the end it has made about 20l and the OG is 1038@20C so it should make a respectable beer. I'd have preferred a bit higher but couldn't be bothered to boil some extract.

Still face the problem of filtering the beer before it goes through the cooler, not sure what to do about that. Will consider options when I get my own boiler.

Yeast preparations

Opened yeast today, Monday, slow expansion through the week as it is old.
Pitched to 1l starter on Friday morning, by Sat morning it was going well. Perfect timing.

Opened the first bottled No. 10

Oh, I needn't have worried about the bottles being carbonated or anything. They're very lively, and taste OK too - I was worried that the 48 hours spent in the barrel with so much air would have sent the beer off, but it's OK. It will be interesting for those who said 'I don't like homebrew because it's not carbonated' to try and see if they like it now. I carefully explained the 2 stage fermentation but I guess some just didn't get it. The best part of this was the wife said she liked it! Excellent.

Anyway, nine bottles still survive...

Bottling No. 10

Again, done in a hurry but the 5l left over from the party (The beer was well received, although I didn't like it much as it wasn't hoppy enough for me. That's different tastes I guess...) was sitting in an open barrel and would go off so I sterilised 10 bottles and filled them.

The only interesting bit was the priming which was done with 1 heaped teaspoon of glucose per bottle, plus 3 for luck, boiled in 1l of water for 15 mins and then distributed by eye amongst the bottles. Let's see how it works...