Nightmare of a Hobgoblin

[inthedark]

Having a bit of a trying brewday today. Trying out a Hobgoblin clone extracted from a recipe posted by Orfy

Hit mash temperature spot on, everything was going well and my spinny sparging thing stopped spinning and sparging.

I've no idea what's wrong with it - I've poked the holes through with a pin, if I blow through it the air comes out at the arms spin round. It just won't let water through. No time for panic. What do I do now?

So suddenly I'm a batch sparger, thanks to eskimobob's online calculator. Hopefully the extra 30 minutes mashing time won't do it any harm, and I've got just about 30L of wort into the boiler eventually. If this turns out ok, I may be a convert.

cheers

[wetdog]

I think when you consider that some people mash overnight then an extra half hour wont' do any harm. I think I'm going to do this as my next brew provided I can get hold of the Cara so I'd be interested in finding out how yours turns out.

[coatesg]

Hope all is going well now - I have trouble with the spinny if I don't have enough head in the HLT - it needs a bit of pressure to keep it spinning.

Orfy's hobgoblin is a great recipe - the 5 gallons I made disappeared quite quickly when they were ready...

[inthedark]

Well, so far so good - I seem to have achieved something approaching 70% efficiency which I'm very happy with. Think I might use this method in future - certainly less fiddling about.

[crow_flies]

I brewed this a couple of months back. I had a problem with it carbonating - the yeast knackered fermenting it, but on Jim's advice I re-seeded it with a pack of lager yeast and a small amount of the beer and it has been an absolute cracker. Took a bottle to my brother in law this evening and he was well impressed, reckoned it tasted lik the real thing.... to me it tastes slightly more 'hard' i want to say, its not so soft in the mouth and the malt is more evident , but that's possibly down to my hopping rate or my water i guess?

/CF

[inthedark]

Because the OG was quite high, I probably overpitched to be on the safe side - used S-04 and made a starter up with one packet then added an old out of date one straight into the FV too.

Fermentation was quick and pretty violent! Yeast overflowed the FV twice, even after I'd skimmed quite a bit from the first time. All finished by yesterday (down to 1012) - just 4 days. Racked it off into a second FV last night.Tastes lovely. I plan on leaving this one to condition for a good 8-12 weeks so hopefully carbonation won't be a problem, but I'll bear your advice in mind, thanks.