I'll explain later.....The shedule was...
Pale Malt - 5.5kg
Torrified Wheat - 0.3kg
@ 60 minute mash.
Batch sparge.
Boil:
Challenger 0.45kg @ 60min
EK Goldings 0.20kg @ 15min
EK Goldings 0.45kg @ 0min
I treated my liquor to a crushed campden tablet, and set it away. The HLT/Boiler took around 40mins to heat the mash water to 80c. Mashing was done in 60 mins without the coolbox mashtun loosing any temperature, not bad for nearly 20 years old!
Sparging was by batch sparge using a Youngs FV with grainbag and produced just shy of around 30litres of pre-boil wort. ***having read this again, I think it was more 27 litres***
The copper was set away to attain the boil before adding the hops. At this point I must explain that the boiler is an aluminium stand-alone boiler powered by gas....
As it produced the foam and hot-break, I didn't add the hops quickly enough to counter-act the foam and resulted in a boil-over all over the kitchen floor before the gas was turned off. Result = One sticky floor. My dogs seem to love it though!
As the boil finished and the chiller running, we waited until the temperature had dropped to 25c and then transferred to the FV. When it had finished, Garth noticed that the cold break was actually happening in the FV and not the Copper. As neither of us have used an immersion chiller before, we believe that insufficient time was given between the chiller finishing and the transfer to the FV. It could also be down to the boil-over though. As a result I have a lot of crap in the bottom of the FV
I was using Promash and getting confused with it, I forgot to include the loss of liqour to hops in my calculations which resulted in a brew-length of 19 litres instead of 23
. At the end of the day, today's brew was trial to a) test the equipment and b) to get the 'knack' of it.As a result of seeing what is in the FV against the time taken to do it (4.5hrs), I am going to up the stakes and go larger to produce at least double the amount. For the sake of an extra hour or, I can double the amount of beer which in turn means I won't need to brew as often (I say that now though!
)Even though it went with hiccups, I am in no doubt that AG is the way to go! I'm currently looking at S/S boilers and tuns
Many thanks to Garth for giving up your time and effort and putting up with my disorganised madness and the scruffiness that is Chatteau Sh*thouse!
