I couldn't wait any longer to source another kettle element and so after months of not being able to brew I decided I could just about botch one up.The recipe is for "a well hopped pale ale" ...
As there's no kettle elements in the HLT, I thought I might just be able to use the 53L kettle to heat the mash and sparge water up, then pump / scoop that up to the mash tun and HLT... all went well though it took a while to get the temps I wanted. hit the mash bang on the temp I wanted at 67C. I had 73C water in the HLT (with a heat exchanger inside) and so I decided to see if I could recirculate .. I put the pump on and within seconds I get a stuck mash. Turns out my idea to put a small metal coffee press filter around the pipe under the false bottom wasn't such a good idea.
So after an hour, I had to dunk it into the kettle and use the false bottom in there. Draining out to fermeters...
I batch sparged by draining the first runnings, adding the sparge water, giving it a stir, leaving for 10m then draining the second runnings... Very easy to do, but for some stupid reason I decided to turn the element on for a bit as the mash was so cooled down. (52C) I left it on for a good 5 minutes and decided it wasn't worth it and continued..
After emptying the kettle/mash tun, I noticed some grain had fused to the element, burnt.. not nice to see, but as far as I can tell, I don't think it affected the taste of the wort.
One bit of luck I had was that I hit 5.2pH almost spot on!
The boil was pretty vigorous... the 2.75kw element boiling 30L of wort after being scrubbed clean was almost gushing it out of the pot
Originally I had planned on just using the Nelson Sauvin for bittering and the Willamette for flavour and aroma. I ended up adding 11g of Nelson Sauvin for bittering, then 33g of Willamette at 30m .. then for the 15m addition I decided they didn't smell like they would taste / smell great on their own but the smell of the Nelson Sauvin would match them perfectly, so I added 11g NS at 12m instead of 15m after needing a couple of extra minutes to weigh them out. I then decided to add some more near the end of the boil so I dunked in 21g at 5 min ... a couple of minutes later I turned round and noticed I'd forgotten to put the 33g of Willamette in so I dunked them in at 3m. At the end of the boil, I wanted to chill to 80C to add more NS but ended up getting it closer to about 65C. .. Didn't think the cold infusion back to the kettle would decrease it so much.
http://flstudio-tutorials.com/pics/brew ... d-wort.jpg
http://flstudio-tutorials.com/pics/brew ... t-foam.jpg
http://flstudio-tutorials.com/pics/brew ... t-foam.jpg
