Sort of Tanglefoot 45 ltr(ish) batch

[Martin the fish]

We are having a hell of a storm here at the moment. Lost sky tv so thought i'd come post my last brewday pic's. Anyone else lose sky when it rains? We always lose it every time it rains? Equivalent of leaves on the track i think
Anyway, i put a lot of info about the brewday in recipe section- i blame the drink.
So i'll quickly go over the day here and post my pic's.

I had limited MO left so i browsed through my meagure recipe collection and discovered that 2 x Tanglefoot was near enough the MO i had left. Tanglefoot recipe require's a LOT of sugar though. So i added some crystal and wheat in place of sugar. Doubled up the hops and that was good enough for me. I would've used sugar but the recipe just states sugar? What type? Demerera? Caster? Icing? Thats like saying 'cook some meat' in a food recipe. Useless really IMO.

Middle Earth Brewery has aquired a bit of gubbins now. My 'huge' work surface is shrinking each brew as i accumulate more stuff for the brewery. I'm gonna buy some big storage vessels for my grains soon and keep them in the fermenting room. Could probably do with organising my space a bit more efficiently but as i have a 9m x 6m workshop i just spread it all over the place.

[Martin the fish]

I poured 20 ltr's of water from HLT into MT and mashed in. Took temp reading and it was 78C+ I had poured in boiling water from HLT So i added a ltr of cold, which was the max i could fit in MT and it was still 74C. So i drained off 2 ltr's and then added 2 ltr's of cold. Keeping the hot wort to add to the wort i would later collect. This bought the temp down to 68C.

My biggest grain bill so far-or as a pom should i call it grist? Or is grist when you've added it to water? Or is grain bill an americanism? V confusing all these senseless descriptions.


Was panicking a bit at the time. Will heating the grains to 78C+ while mashing in do any harm?

I managed to get the temp down to 68C in a short while-no harm done i hope.

[Martin the fish]

I wrapped up my MT and left it for an hour. I checked temp and it had dropped two degrees. At this stage i could just about squeeze in 500ml of boiling water and that bought temp back up to 68C. I was well happy with that and wrapped MT back up again. I re-filled HLT and set that to boil.


As things had not gone to plan as far as this stage i didn't have a beer. I knew it would be quite a while untill i had boiled up my 2nd batch.

[Martin the fish]

I spent 2 hrs sparging. I had to pour another 10ltr's into HLT and turn on the elements occasionally to keep the temp up. I now sparge as slowly as i can get away with. My masses of copper sparge device conducts heat away like something that conducts heat really quickly-copper. Already designed a SS modified version. This means if i sparge with 80C water it comes out of the sparge arm at about 72, leaving my grain bed at about 64C. So i sparge with 90C water that comes out of sparge arm at about 80C and brings grain bed up to about 74C. I have no idea at all what temp the grain bed is supposed to be at. I just know that my beer tastes better and is fuller when i sparge at 90C. I also seem to get slightly better efficiency. 75 as opposed to 60. I stopped sparging when wort was at 1012. I'd collected 48 ltr's at 1036 pre boil. That was one point down on beersmith's prediction of 1037.

I do get a nice clear wort without recirculating much-about a litre, thats all.

I guess i could have sparged to 1010 and collected a bit more wort but i'm not that bothered with the pre boil volume being only 48ltr's. Beersmith predicted 54ltr.

[Martin the fish]

I weighed out my hops ready for the boil. 2nd mistake of the day. I weighed out all the boil hops-36g Challenger and 20g Northdown pellets. Placed these in a zip lock bag ready for the boil. I then weighed out the late hops. 40g Northdown and put these in a zip lock bag. Just as i done this i remembered i had two equal boils to do. Doh! So i gave the mix of Challenger and Northdown a good shake and weighed out half. Did the same with the late hops.
Was too annoyed with myself to take a pic of the whole lot split into correct weights and bagged up so here's the one with them all in, having a great time, laughing at me and enjoying each others company.

[Martin the fish]

Here's the wort i had collected pre-boil.


Notice that the 'stand' that my boiler sits on is already heavily stained and sticky with wort. I need to cover this with some plastic. Or better still utilise some spare worktop that i have. I may not bother with either as it's all getting replaced with a beerbelly system as soon as i can afford it. Which in the current climate may be a while so i may be forced to 'make good'.
If you look carefully where the black handle to my tap is you will see some white stress bits in the plastic of the boiler. These are from turning the tap on when the boiler is hot. I'm not happy about these at all really. It's an accident waiting to happen. And it points right at my tackle when i'm sitting down in my brew chair watching the boil. Not good.

[Martin the fish]

I got my big FV rinsed out and put 15litres of warm ish water in, dosed with sterilising powder and left to do it's thang.
My boiler boils way too fiercely with both elements on. So i use two to get it up to boil and then switch one off once it's boiling. I also put my hops in a grain bag, tie up the top with copper wire and dangle it into boiler. I find i have a lot less hassles with my absolutely rubbish home made hop strainer that way. I also put my sieve on top of boiler to sterilise and use this to help strain the irish moss out of the wort-along with some break material that collects.

After 75 mins i added the late hops. 5 mins later i added a tsp of irish moss and my trusty IC. Incidently my IC works a lot better if i connect the inlet water to the pipe that flows to the bottom of the chiller first. Obvious really but i'd never even thought about it till now.

Herbie came to remind me that this time of the day was 'walk' time.



Bit of a scruffy bugger but he's a real cracker of a dog.

[Martin the fish]

I took this pic. Then turned off boiler elements and connected up IC. Put lid over to stop moths and the like getting in and took Herb for a walk for half hour. When i returned the IC had got the wort down to 22C. So i transfered this cooled wort to my sterilised and rinsed FV.



I ended up with 19 ltr's from this boil. I probably turned the other element on too many times during the boil and next batch i will just leave a single element running.

[Martin the fish]

Got quite a nice shot of my Fantail. They are quite similar to English flycatchers. They catch all their food on the wing and that comprises mostly of flying insects. When i'm brewing the flies are really attracted into the workshop so the fantail comes in and helps me out by feeding on them. He sits on my extension cable up by the light and sings away like a good un. It's a pleasure to have him around.
If the background to this shot was good it'd be a really fine image but it's not. Nice nonetheless.

[Martin the fish]

2nd boil was fairly uneventfull. I've moved my chair to a different position so if the boiler does split my nads won't get covered in boiling sticky wort.

I cooled the wort with my IC and then transfered to FV on top of the 1st batch. I got 21 ltr's from 2nd batch as i only boiled with the single element. I then realised that i had to lift and carry the FV into the house and into my fermenting room. Managed to do that without killing myself or dropping the FV, thankfully. Took a reading-1042 at 20C. I am pleased with that as i wanted a lower strength beer than tanglefoot but in the same style. After that i pitched two sachets of yeast. One of S04 and one of muntons gold. I noticed the MG is only 6g so wondered if that would be enough?

[Martin the fish]

Today the airlock is continous-no gaps just a stream of bubbles. So the two yeasts seem to be getting busy and doing their thang. The krausen is about an inch high after 24hrs, so i'm happy enough with my long brewday. 12 hr's in total. I reckon it'll be a different story come bottling day. I really need to get myself some corni's as bottling 40 ltr's is gonna be a bit of a chore.

Need to order some more grain tomorrow so i can do a 'comfortable' 30 ltr batch of Orc Slayer at weekend.

[Martin the fish]

Lots of great pictures as usual Martin.

If you are sparging that slowly, you might want to consider making sure you raise the grain bed temperature up to 77 deg to 'mash out' and denature the enzymes to prevent any further conversion of dextrins to maltose otherwise you may find the wort becomes a little too fermentable.

Ah, ok DaaB. Thanks for that. Is it ok to be a little over 77C? I need to sparge with very hot water, almost boiling, as the heat loss from HLT to MT with my system is huge. Plus my sparge arm rely's on the lid of coolbox/MT being off so i get extra heat loss that way too.

I'm hoping to have my 'new' sparge device working by next brew. As long as work and stuff doesn't get in the way. Work is such a pain when all i wanna do is play with my brewery.

[Scooby]

Great post and pic's, with a natural history interlude as well.

It's Grist as far as I'm concerned

[Martin the fish]

It's actually MKIV. The other ones were crap. Got too technical. I'm now gonna copy Wallybrew's motorised version and utilise a valentine arm.

I'll have to have a few goes before i'll be able to keep grain bed at 77C. But i will.
Thanks for the advice DaaB.

[Martin the fish]

Bottled this batch up today. FG was 1016. I thought it may ferment down more but it didn't. Which leaves me with 48 x 750ml bottles of 3.38% Tanglefoot copy. Not really Tanglefoot at all at 3.3 though But it's a nice colour and tastes ok-ish at bottling, albeit quite light.

I'll see how it tastes in a month from now.