Home Brew Forum

My first BrewDay on film!!

Part 1

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CDG7npVXPlY

Part 2

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VTosE0Dg0hw

Constructive criticism is most welcome as I have only been brewing since December 08 and started with All Grain!

Nice videos. I use the same mash tun and no longer measure the water additions for my 23l length brews nor do I preheat the mash tun, I use 82c water from start to finish. It's really lazy but it works brilliantly.

Half fill the (cold) mash tun with 82c water, dough in and if necessary add a litre of cold water to get near 67c (I usually don't need this however). Lid on and no wrapping the mash tun at all, 90 minutes later it's lost 2c absolute maximum. Fill to 1.5" from the top of the mash tun with 82c water (usually raises to about 72c), stir and leave 10 minutes. Usual recirculation stuff and run off, fill again to within 1.5" of the top with 82c water (hit about 77c-78c), 10 minutes etc. I usually end up with around 30 litres which is ideal for my 90 minute boil. If I'm slightly over I just boil harder for longer (2 elements instead of 1) or just boil it a little longer.

Looking at your videos your mash tun was filled to exactly the same levels as mine. It helps that I tend to make beers that are usually 5% +/- .5% ABV and rarely stray from that but I know I could tweak it if I went higher or lower anyway.

Super vids, interesting yeast pitch?, what was the origional yeast you used?

Thanks for the comments! I harvested the yeast a few brews before from a bottle of Fullers 1845 & I think its a bottom fermenting yeast. Before that I harvested yeast from bottles of Bowman's Quiver which was an amazing yeast that gave a huge head and left the beer crystal clear after fermentation.
I have not used fining's yet in my brewing process and find that with the Fullers yeast it takes ages for my beer to clear.

Nice one, any plans to use a hop strainer instead of the bag?

That sounds like an interesting progression I will have to look into that! Do you think it would massively improve things?

It would give you better hop utilisation as the hops would get lots of movement with the boil rather than the bag stopping some of the vigour. Its supposed to be better

If you are going to boil the hops loose be careful with that burco. First time I used one with what looks like the same perforated cover over the element I found hops collected inside and made it cut out. Just removed the cover next time and never had another problem.