Recipe
Grain:
5Kg Maris Otter
500g Chocolate Malt
250g Black Malt
150g Roasted Barley
Hops:
60g Goldings 90 min
20g Goldings 15 min
10g Goldings 80C steep
Yeast
Wyeast 1028 London Ale
23l, target OG 1053
I added the roast barley to the Gail Porter recipe last time I did it and I love the flavour. I think the 150g is about right to get the taste but without it taking too long to mellow down enough to be gluggable. Hops are all Goldings 'cos I have about a half kilo to use up, and the yeast is 1028 London Ale because I had it in and fancied a go with it. This was one of the Wyeast "Activator" direct pitch packs, and I didn't make a starter because I only decided to use it today. It says it's for pitching direct to 5 gals, so we'll see what happens.
Other new stuff for this brew is that this is the first time I've treated my water, it's the first time I've used a 3 tier gravity system and it's the first time I've used my new shiny kettle and Bullfinch burner to boil in. Lots of new stuff - probably too much really.
For the water treatment, I used Graham's superb calculator and treated the entire 50l in the HLT with CRS to bring it down to a residual alkalinity of 20 mg/l CaCO3, then selected "Porter" as the target water profile and then adjusted the water quantity to the total amount of water than would go through the mash tun and into the boiler - in this case 37 litres and let the calculator work out how much and what to add.
It said: 1.37g of calcium sulphate, 4g of Calcium Chloride and 11.3g of salt. For the salt, I used Saxa. I wanted to use "good" sea salt, but wasn't sure about whether the additional minerals would be a problem. I put about 40% of the dry salts into the mash, and the rest into the boil. I'm not sure if I should actually have calculated the salts for the final brew length (23l, or the full volume of water I would use to mash and boil (37l). The more I think about it, the more I think I did it wrong....but it's too late now.
I also added a crushed camden tablet to the HLT.
So -let's cut to the chase.......here's the brew porn:
Grain bill. Really must have the Mrs. clean the windows in the garage.....
Liquor salts for the mash. Somehow, it just feels wrong putting table salt in my beer.....we'll see how it turns out.
Mashed in. Game on!
Pretty close to my target temp of 67C. This is the first time I have been able to fill the tun by gravity, and it is so much easier than jugging water into the HLT, then out again. This alone must have saved me at least half an hour today. On the downside, I don't yet have a (normal, tea type) kettle in the garage, so I didn't preheat the mash tun. I just filled it when the HLT was at 80C and it settled nicely at 74C, so I mashed in and ended up with 67.4, which was great.
Mash pH. Looks to be pretty much smack on 5.2 to me, but I'm a bit colour blind, so what do I know....
This is reusing the hop strainer from my H&G boiler (which is now my HLT, so doesn't need it anymore). I've got a nice stainless replacement on order, but it hasn't arrived yet, so it's a case of make do and mend.
Hops ready to go. I was going to use S-04 originally, but switched horses to the Wyeast at the last moment.
First runnings into the boiler. Another big difference today was being able to sparge straight into the boiler and get that heating up straight away. It's made life much easier than sparging into buckets, emptying the HLT/Boiler and then pouring the wort back into it. Less lifting and probably saves me another half hour. All good so far.....
Bullfinch burner going full tilt. You can't see quite how powerful this thing is, but the bit of red glowing metal is a hefty chunk of iron! This burner puts out 12kW, or more if you jack up the pressure. It sounds like a fighter plane. I'm impressed. No rolling boil photos as there was too much steam. The wort was almost boiling by the time i had run off the first batch sparge.
Chiller in. The dedicated connection works well - although I guess I can trim the hose tails now. This chiller will get replaced by a plate chiller as soon as that arrives. Then in the hot months, I might use the IC in an ice bath to prechill the cooling water. Mrs. DM needs to clean this wondow as well!
I seem to have accidentally deleted the pic of the pre-boil gravity reading. It was 1044, which was exactly what i wanted.
Running off into FV
Post boil gravity - 1062. Ooops.....looks like I boiled off too much. I collected 19l at 1062 instead of 23l at 1053. This is the very first wort out of the kettle - hence the break material in it. I took the next 4l and poured them back in and after that it was about as clear as you can get for black!
So..... I remember reading here that you can multiple the number of litres by the gravity to get a total number of "sugar points". In this case, 19 x 62 =1178. Then, divide that by the target volume and you'll get the OG if you dilute to that volume.....in this case, 1178 / 23 = 53.6. Sounds right...so I added 4 litres of preboiled, colled water and.....
Bingo! 1053/1054. Phew. Thought I'd [censored] up there, but it looks like I fixed it. I'm going to have to learn to either add more water to compensate for the burner power, or turn it down a bit! It gets an impressive rolling boil though.
Here's the trub at the bottom of the kettle. This drained out really nicely and left less wort behind than the old H&G boiler.
And finally, wort aerated, yeast pitched, ready to put it to bed!
Anyway.. that all went fairly smoothly apart from the overboiling issue. One thing I have a problem with now though is that I have no way of telling how much wort is going into the boiler now. With the H&G one, I could see the level and I had marked the side to show the different volumes. So how do you guys with shiny kettles know how much wort is in there (and I don't want to put a sight tube in the kettle)? Just a dip stick or something??
This was also my quickest brew day ever. I'd have been wrapped up well inside 5 hours if I hadn't had to deal with the dilution issue, and take the family out for a curry....
All in all, the new brewery layout works well and will only get better and easier as get it dialed in and learn the quirks.
