Home Brew Forum

Wow what a day!!!! Got up at 7:20am, got everything setup, calculated my sparge water. All was set. Filled up the burco with the water turned it on "click" ummm what was that? The fuse box had tripped the socket circuits, balls! Try again same thing, at this point I'm thinking noooooo my poor flat can't take the 2.5Kv . Then I noticed when the boiler had enough water in it there was water slowly pouring out of the bottom, which was the culprit for tripping the fuse box. At this point I thought my day was over before it had started.

Texted jaycee (guy I bought the burco from) to see if he had any ideas, he called back a few minutes later offering to swap out the boiler with another he had spare. 1.5 hrs later after driving to somerset and back, I had a fully functioning burco. (John you're a life saver!). So anyway here's the recipe (thanks norm!) a Bath Ales Gem clone, my brewery is the closet brewery and I couldn't call it gem. So I give you Closet Sapphire!

MARIS OTTER PALE MALT 3590 gms
WHEAT MALT 40 gms
CRYSTAL MALT 320 gms
CHOCOLATE MALT 40 gms

HOPS boil time 90 minutes

Boadicia 33 gms

Add20 gms GOLDINGS last 15 minutes








So the first half of batch 1:


Putting the grain in:


Monster mash:


Top up for batch 1:


Batch 1 now in the HLT (also my FV):


Batch 2 is where I hit big problems, hence the lack of pictures. I didn't have any appropriate tubing to connect from the copper manifold to the drum tap of the MT, so I made do with hose pipe for my first attempt, big mistake! The hose pipe worked it's way lose from the tap, meaning the whole thing got clogged up. It took me 40mins to transfer from the MT to the HLT, I had to improvise by jugging into the HLT and using a sieve to make sure the grain didn't transfer across to the wort. Nightmare!!!

Anyway, I finally managed to get the wort from the HLT to the boiler


Cooling took 25mins down to 24C, not bad!!!! In this picture you can see a jug over my tap, this is because the hozelock wasn't a perfect to my tap and was spraying everywhere! Oh well home brew is all about bodging from I can tell


And finally the wort in the FV with the Nottingham yeast pitched, I have about 19L out of the planned 23L, I put this down to the disatrous 2nd batch! OG measure at this point was 1043. Not too bad I think


I first turned on the boiler (after I got the replacement) at 10:30am, finished at about 18:30pm, I think there may be room for improvement

Seems it a bit of a first Ag brew day for some of us looks like you had some fun and I hope you get your mashtun sorted !
Congrats on your day hope the brew tastes as good as it looks.

Oh and I just realised I forgot to put the Protafloc tablet in for the last 15mins of the boil, hopefully this won't make much difference. Also I'm hoping I remembered to rinse off the thermometer after I santised it when I was measuring the temp of the wort during the cooling.

Out of interest when should I start seeing some activity in the FV?

If you are using loose hops take the cover off the element, as they can get trapped underneath and cause the boiler to trip out and leave black scorch marks on the element and a burnt flavour to the beer.
If using muslin hop bags the cover won't be a problem.
The lack of copper finings won't harm the taste of the beer, in fact it will taste a bit more full bodied, but the clarity of it will suffer a bit.

Good luck with the ferment.

Good job Paul!

Now at least you have beer underway, plus you know the weak points of your system and can fix them for the next brew!

What doesn't kill us, makes us stronger.....

Well done Paul

What did i say about that P.F tablet

Have you decided on bottling or kegging yet?

Well Done Paul.. It took me three attempts to get it right....

Keep us updated as to how its progressing

jaycee wrote:Well done Paul

What did i say about that P.F tablet

Have you decided on bottling or kegging yet?

Still to do some research on that! Probably half and half, am I right in thinking the beer will keep longer in bottles?

Good job!

I have a couple of things to fix

1. I have to find some PVC braided tubing to fix to my strainer in the mash tun, so next time it won't come off the tap!!!! Anyone got any ideas where I can get this from?
2. I'd like to figure out a way to get the last remnants from the boiler into the FV, my boiler is a burco and I used a piece of splatter guard rolled up into the tap to strain the hops, but that did mean near the bottom the hops coated it and wouldn't allow the last half bottle of beer or so to escape.

Measured the gravity today, it's around the 1014/1015 mark now. After 48hrs, so I'm guessing it'll only be another day or two before it's ready to keg. I'll check again on thursday, then again on friday. If the reading is the same I'll keg on Friday evening.

Sound about right?

hello?

Gravity now at 1012 almost done