Doughing in!
Hit the mash temp almost spot on!
After 60 mins we recirculated using the little solar projects pump!
My brother Liam who came up from Rugby for the brewday! He fabricated the stands for me!
Left it to recirculate for 10 minutes
100g FWH fuggle into the kettle with the new hop stopper!
Salt additions. Off the top of my head it was about 13g calcium chloride, and 8g epsom, some common salt but I can't remember how much!
First wort going into the kettle
Started getting dark so had to break out the head torch!
checking the progress!
Second sparge going into the kettle
50 plate chiller set up! This thing was awesome! Turned it on straight after flame out and the wort was coming out at 22 deg C after about 30 seconds!
I didnt realise how much wort was actually going to be held up inside the chiller so I recon that's where a good 1L of final wort went to as it spilled out over my kitchen floor when I went to clean it!
Nice clear wort coming out into the FV
The filth!
Pitched two packets of Nottingham rehydrated as per the instructions! It was showing signs of life in the morning which was 7 hours after pitching! We were aiming for 40L at 1.060 but got 35L at 1.061. I think I can account for the losses but I'll talk about that in a bit.
Now as far as numbers are concerned We hit the mash temp all but 0.6 of a degree. That was great as I didn't know how much boiling water it would take to pre heat the 80L mash tun. Two kettles it would seem!
We also hit the PBG spot on at 1.054 and the OG was meant to be 1.060 and we got 1.061. I have no way of knowing if we hit out pre boil volume as I didn't calibrate a measuring stick.
I reckon the losses came from:
1: The boil took about 45 minutes to really get going, after about half an hour we raised the gas ring up about 5mm so that it was closer to the bottom of the kettle. I think we may have been loosing a bit of heat to the atmosphere instead of heating up the wort. this i reckon lead to an increased loss to evaporation!
2: I definitely lost 1L of wort to the plate chiller as it ended up on my kitchen floor when I came to clean the chiller!
3: After cleaning out the copper tonight I found about 2.5L of wort still in the bottom. Now on brew day the kettle drained till no more would come out. As soon as I removed the hop stopper it ran out again. I think I need to redesign the hop stopper for this copper. It drains from the middle but after closer inspection tonight the kettle itself has a slopped bottom so it should have an effective dead space of nothing as it drains out to the tap. I have another hop stopper design in mind for this I just need to get some more mesh!
Apart from that the hop stopper worked a treat! No seeds of hop leaf got through. A bit of break material came though but that passed straight through the plate chiller. When I back flushed it for about half an hour it seemed to clear itself. It then got baked in the over (until I get a pressure cooker for next time) and is now sat with star san solution made up with boiled water, foil wrapped openings and the plastic caps back on the openings.
All in all I am very impressed worth the chiller. We recirculated the wort through the chiller till the wort was coming out at 22 with the water turned off! We then let it settle for half an hour and then gravity fed into the FVs.
I'm writing a list of observations and things I want/need to do before next brew day. This includes
1: Sight gauge for HLT
2: Pump and chiller on some type of board so they are fixed down
3: Hop stopper redesign
4: calibrated stick for brew kettle
5: return manifold for mash tun (probably 45 degree T manifold)
6: pressure cooker for plate chiller cleaning
there will probably be more when i really get to think about it.
All in all it went pretty damn smooth. It wasn't stressfull, it was great having it all just set up instead of moving stuff around in the kitchen. I should have done this ages ago.
Let just hope the beer tastes good!
LB ............... out
I'll look forward to seeing some more brewdays on your new kit 
