Home Brew Forum

Hi All,

Well after the long weekend I finally got the basic equipment finished and my garage cleared of enough junk to start my long awaited first All Grain Brew "Toasted Oatmeal Stout". I will be putting up some pictures of my Brewery DIY project and would like to thanks all of the Brewing equipment posters and the AG brewers that made my first AG possible (Too many to mention personally) but thanks to Jubby for showing me the ropes, ChrisG for the Recipe, Vossy & daab and others for the equipment.

First off the Recipe



Going for 26 Litres on this one and as it was my first brew I decide to leave the defaults alone until I could get an idea on my efficiency etc...



Well here is my grain bill and everything seems in order, except If i remember the title it says Toasted Oatmeal and I have just realised that my oatmeal is still perfectly preserved in the packet...Shite, get the correct quantity out of the bag and go and do some roasting. Having checked the website and switched off my HTL/Boiler as it was over temp at this stage I gave the Oatmeal 45min in the oven @ 190C as per directions on the forums. Next issue was that on looking closely at the supplies from the Hop & Grape (Thanks for the quick delivery guys) it seems the roasted barley was not in stock and I had missed it..Damn Scrub out Roasted Barley and sub some black malt instead as the EBU's are the same and throw in some uncrushed malted barley which went in the oven the same time as the Oatmeal. It was only 22gms so thought that would be OK. (amended Ingredients list). It seems the toasted Oats had it in for me as when I took then out of teh oven they decide that it would be fun to get the lip[ of the roasting tin caught up on one of the knobs on the cooker and try and escape all over the hob and the floor . This point is where the wife started to ignore me and the profanities to which I has succumbed



So I now have all my grain and I'm ready to turn on the HLT which has dropped in temperature a bit, No where the hell is GARTH and his sight tubes when you need one. I marked the boiler up with 5 Lite increments but in the garage when I'm filling up with water I cannot see where the hell the water levels are in this 10Gal HOP & Grain Bucket Step ladder, finger and some guesswork gets me to the 40 Litre mark and a slightly boiled finger (Maybe a secret ingredient to my Liquor water, who knows will keep you informed). The recipe says I will need just over 37 Litres so I should be OK with what I have. The boiler leftover was judged to be 600ml on testing. So finger sorted and i'm set up and ready to mash.



Added 5ml of Sodium metabisulphite to the liquor and then put the water in the mashtun at around 77c to allow for the tun to warm up and hopefully get the strike temp @ 72-73 C as per Graham's "Beer Engine". Suddenly realised that I didn't know how much water to put in the Tun before adding the grain Do I go the forum or just get something that resembles porridge? Ended up with around 18-20 Litres. Once there I scooped up the grain from the FV and added to the MashTun, stirred with a big spoon and took the temp reading.



WOW It worked my temp is just 66C, too a minute to get there but there it is the proof in a picture... . On with the lid a wait for 90 min. Time for some sterilization me thinks.



90min later and the temp is still on target, I was beaming from ear to ear when the lid came off and I got this reading. The only thing that worried me was the PH reading I took at the start and 30min into the mash. I had a awful time trying to read the PH tabs. I am guessing from the two I took that my mash was somewhere between 6.0 (first reading) and 5.6 (30min in) but with the grain sticking to the bit of paper and the brown wort all over them it was hard to tell. I wanted to do a brew without messing with the water to see how it turned out and then think about using some CRS in the Liquor to see the difference. Maybe this need to be address sooner rather than later should I worry



Copying the technique of Jubby, I got some aluminium foil and put a load of holes in it to act as a sparge defuser and tried his fly sparging method to great effect. You can see the nice dark wort in the hydro jar to the left of the picture. You may also notice that the hydrometer is a little lower than it should be. panic stations, get the laptop and check the Hydrometer adjustment calculator and its all out of wack OH No what's happening rechecking the figures yep something wrong here. The wort was at 1.025 @ 55C and now it's at 1.000 and the colour hasn't changed too much. Still tasted sweet. Sherlock to the rescue Seems my Hydrometer had it in for me as well and decided that today a hole below it's keel would be a good laugh and it had given me a sample jar of broken glass to boot Thank goodness I have a spare Hydrometer... YEAH AS IF, Throwing the wort away from the trail jar I then have the decision on how to check when to stop sparging . In a panic I shut off the sparging and drove around a mates house who I knew would have a spare or at least their one and rushed back to my brew. Patiently waits for a good time to overtake the tractor on a single lane road all the way to my turn off and also waits for the learner driver to complete his 6 point turn on my road...



Restarted sparging and managed to collect all the wort, ended up at 32.5 Litres at pre-boil which seems a lot but it was still giving good SG readings so I carried on until all the water was used in the HLT. Forgot to photograph the hops and their addition but it was 30min after this picture that I added 50gms of Goldings. Mumm what an aroma....sigh. Boil went to plan but still waiting for number 3 disaster to occur. They always come in three right!. I didn't have long to wait



After 75min I inserted the "Scooby Special" Wort cooler, In testing it worked a treat with no leaks or issues. It's first production run and it decides to explode on impact the compression joint on the cold inlet valve decides that it would be a great laugh to pop off spraying cold water everywhere...HAHA HA...not this time you gremlins, fortunately within the build specs I had added two washing machine ball valves so that I could independently turn on/off the water flow to the chiller Glad I did that little addition now but it seems Mr Muscle I am not, the compression joint was obviously not tight enough to cope with the immersion in the hot water. So 15 min to fix and no spare olive to hand as the one that was on the pipe came off but wouldn't go back on Finally found a suitable olive and replaced it and tightened up the joint.

Very happy with the chiller it got the temp don in about 20-25min, next time I'm going to use a stop watch to confirm but overall I very happy Transferred the wort into the FV and pitched the Yeast starter that was sitting in the 1 litre bottle bubbling away nicely. A word of advise don't shake your yeast to get it all mixed in before you undo the bottlecap and pitch it into the wort Minto's and coke spring to mind. One very wet Tequilla and yeast all over the floor later the FV lid was sealed and the FV moved to a nice warm place in the dining room to be left fermenting.



Time for a beer me thinks, Picc of my Tooheys Dark Ale

Start time 13:00, finish time 21:30
OG ended up @ 1.051 instead of 1.047 and the total volume was just under 30L???
Guess my efficiency was better than expected. I presume this could have been a result of me stopping sparging halfway through to go get a replacement Hydrometer?

Anyway It's done and I will update you when I get it into the bottles/barrel..

Cheers

Excellent stuff, so was the mash liquor volume as stated on your Beer Engine print out?

Ha Ha! , missed that little figure, I was pretty flustered in a good way most of the day. the 13.9 Litres shown as mash liquor, is that the quantity you are meant to put in the Mashtun before the grains are added?

I guess it's true what some people say. No matter what you do beer seems to want to make itself...lol

Here's a picture of my brew 2 days on


Presume the stuff at the top is Trub? I didn't use any protofloc or whirlfloc this time as I didn't have any, but is on my list as well as the CRS for the next brew order

Nice one mate! The first one is the hardest....it's all downhill coasting from here.....

Nice job Steve. Despite your comedy of errors, I am sure that it will turn out to be one of your best brews. (impressive chiller by the way)

Well done there, looks like you have got yourself a well organised set up there.

Yeah, you may not believe me but I spent all weekend getting ready for this brew which I promised myself I would do. The reason I started at 13:00 was because before then there was no worktop to do my brew on. That was the DIY project for the morning session....

PS Thanks to Freecycle for the 9 ft tiled worktop...

Should be a goodun!

looks like a v.nice setup - much more organised that my chaos also looks like a very nice brew. Its amazing how hectic it gets but i definately think that before you have done one it seems difficult but its not really bad at all. The video brewday posted recently was a god send!

when you starting the next one

I've watched that brew Video some many times, I can almost hear his voice in my head when I'm brewing. And that damn music, Still it could be Chris-x's music I guess, You don't know when your lucky... I should be so Lucky , Lucky....

Just ordered a 25Kg Sack of pale Malt from Barley Bottom along with a number of other grains ready for my next attempts which will be three of my favourite beers from Graham's Book.

Thwaites Dark Mild, Theakstons Old Peculiar and Hopback Summer Lightening and I will still have 12Kg of Pale Malt to think about my next brews. It's going to be 3 weekends of busy brewing to get my stocks up for Summer...lol

PS I'm going to have to think of some new names for my brews to stop numpty critics comparing like with my specials.

Nice work Steve, didn't take you long to knock up all the kit then...good looking setup.

Longer than I would like but the basic setup is there now and more grain ordered, but still need to build a second Boiler so I can have a dedicated HLT.

Well, due to a party on Sunday the FV got moved from the dining room to the garage and the SG was checked and came out at 1.015 so I guess its stopp fermenting. The smell of chocolate and a nice tar burnt taste dominate the little sample I had and for my first brew I am very happy with the results. I took someone's advice (Sorry cannot remember who it was now who posted the suggestion) and I have bottled 3 Litres of the stuff to drink as the brew progresses over the weeks and I will leave the rest of the barrel alone until the bottles say its good to drink.

Only thing left to post is a picture of the first pint I guess.

Cheers

Just about to post my new label for my first AG#1 Brew and thought I would at least put a picture up of the finished product which I decided to call "Barnard 33" after the famous dark nebula.



Cheers

Looks good