Home Brew Forum

Knocked up a 8-10 Gallon batch (it isn't in the fermenter quite yet) of the beer below (london prideish). Quite a long evening no time to post until now and then its straight to the land of nod.

8 Kg MO
0.7 Kg crystal
0.04 Kg carafa I

mash at 65-66 C for 2 hours (longer than normal as i was constructing a bodged three tier system etc)

In the boil
450g invert sugar
250g dark soft brown sugar

Boil for 90 mins
20 g challenger
28g fuggles
40g progress

15 mins
28g EKG
12g challenger

Will be fermenting this with the fullers yeast

Brix reading of 13.75
So about 1054

Blimey...well done DB
Hope it turns out well

Sounds great Del right up my street. I love a bit of pride

Vossy1 wrote:Blimey...well done DB
Hope it turns out well

So do i vossy, quite a bit of effort and lost sleeping time invested in this particular brew.

What was the bodged 3 tier system ?

Vossy1 wrote:What was the bodged 3 tier system ?

Oh nothing too elaborate just a budget barrel as a HLT stacked up on a couple of odds ands ends in the shed, a peice of wood with a hole drilled in it for phils sparge arm thingy and a viewing window/hole to see the grain bed and water level (serious flaw in the bog standard cool box mash tun from H&G).
Not a big fan of the spargy arm thing, most of the sparge water was fired up onto the wood and since it was supposed to be london pride and not a spruce ale i abandoned the damn thing and used a peice of tin foil with holes to dissapate the flow, very low tech but works a treat.

Spent a bit of time building a more substantial base for my barley crusher while i was in bodge mode.

Not a big fan of the spargy arm thing, most of the sparge water was fired up onto the wood and since it was supposed to be london pride and not a spruce ale i abandoned the damn thing and used a peice of tin foil with holes to dissapate the flow, very low tech but works a treat.

That was caused by too fast a flow rate...I know...I've done it myself..except most of the water ended up on the floor

Vossy1 wrote: That was caused by too fast a flow rate...I know...I've done it myself..except most of the water ended up on the floor

Oh yes there was water in abundance, me and phils thingy don't seem to get on too well, too little flow and it sits there lifeless dribbling like an insane imbecille, turn the flow up the tinest increment and it has jets festoning all over the place.
Operator error? probably! but i prefer to blame it on the equipment, call it a useless peice of crap and throw it into the back of the brew cupboard

oh forgot to add that i also used 7g of CaCl2 and 7g of Gypsum in the mash, thought i'd go for the balanced approach this time and see what it does for the flavours.

Operator error? probably! but i prefer to blame it on the equipment, call it a useless peice of crap and throw it into the back of the brew cupboard

Mine behaved in much the same way until I took a file to the small solder blob that holds the horizontal arm thingy in place

call it a useless peice of crap and throw it into the back of the brew cupboard

They don't make em anymore.......it's an antique
I'm sure there are plenty of home brewers who'd pay a premium for it

Nice one Del

The replacement for a Phils arm is 30 quid from Hamstead Homebrew. . . . I'm going to be giving them a try, but I'll fit it to a container with an automatic syphon, so that flow should be easier to control

Aleman wrote:The replacement for a Phils arm is 30 quid from Hamstead Homebrew. . . . I'm going to be giving them a try, but I'll fit it to a container with an automatic syphon, so that flow should be easier to control

£30 a piece of tin foil is so much cheaper

BTW aleman whats an automatic syphon? do you buy these or bodge them?

Thats the first time i've done such a big batch on my own and sans pumps etc i'd have to say its a lot harder work than a 5G batch, not twice as hard for twice the beer but a lot of effort none the less.
I think i'll drop back down to my usual brewlength for a while especially since i'll be doing a wit and a hefe in the near future (i don't want 10G of either of those hanging about, more a speciality beer really.

Looks like you had a good evening