Home Brew Forum

Going for 25L at 5.2%, and using GW's Beer Engine to make adjustments:
5200 gms lager malt, 600 gm wheat malt. I like round numbers.
The Saaz I have is only 2.1% AA, so I adjust the weight according to Beer Engine.

07:30 60L water on to boil, Made a false bottom for tun with perforated stainless steel while waiting.
09:20 Water boiling, added a teaspoon of gypsum to help chalk precipitation.
09:50 Boiler off
10:30 Pumped boiled water to HLT (through CF cooler). HLT now reads 50L at 50C.
10:55 15L liquor into tun, started re-circulation at 39C. Added grains
11.12 After sodding about to get flow rate stable, mash is now 40C:





11.21 Mash at 45C, set PID for 55C
11.30 At 55C, but then overshoots to 57C, increase the P of PID from 5 to 50%, settles down.
11:46 Mash has stable temperature throughout, 56-57C, bit high but...
12:00 Set PID for 66C
12:30 PID has overshot again, now reading 69C, MashMaster reads 68C
Wort is much clearer; this is a much higher flow rate than I use for sparging:



During mashing, I mess about with the PID to make it respond more quickly so I get a higher than usual range:





Re-circulation valve on the left, sparge valve on the right, precision engineering of sparge arm height...



14:00 Start sparge, planning to use another 22L from HLT, First runnings (at 66C):





You can barely see the sparge water entering the tun, it balances pretty well, but I have to adjust it as the valve is a very course control and heat sensitive , replace valves..



14:20 12L to go, SG = 1060 at 66C
14:25 8L to go, 13L in boiler, SG = 1040 at 64C
14:30 5L to go, 17L in boiler, SG = 1022 at 62C
14:35 2L to go, 20L in boiler, SG = 1015 at 61.5C
14:38 Sparge water stopped, used a total of 37L for mash and sparge



14:40 22L in boiler, SG = 1010 at 61C
14:42 Boiler at 45C, burner on
14:45 25.5L in boiler, SG = 1006 at 61C, stopped drain into boiler, drained re-circ line, total=28L

15:10 Cleaning out mash tun, need to find a way to seal round the edge of the false bottom:



For the time being, at least, the perforated sheet sits on top of the mmmbeer grain filter:



Looked round to see



Never had that sort of froth before, maybe because previously I always added the first hops before the wort was boiling!

16:40 Irish moss and Protofloc in
16:55 Boiler off, Saaz steep hops in, lid on

17:18 Wort at 90C, begin recirc (bit hot for pump, but not for very long)

17:28 Wort at 38C, allow to rest because flow rate has significantly reduced - probably hops blocking filter.
17:35 And then it all went a bit tits up !!
19:30 Eventually drained VERY slowly, but the end result was:



This was the hops and trub:



Very little liquid left in the boiler:



At the end of boil I had about 25.5L showing on the sight tube, but I only collected 22 L, expecting closer to 25L.
So as the efficiency was very high anyway, I added 3L of cold water.
I did not measure OG at this stage, but a very quick sum says it is probably still going to give about 5.5% instead of 5.2%.

Lessons:
Change re-circ and sparge valves to give better control
Re-circulate at lower flow rates to start with, avoid filters blocking.
Larger losses than expected in wet hops.
This forum does not like long posts with Windows 7/IE8, had to load Firefox to get it to work
Got to allow for higher efficiencies, otherwise all production will be "fall over juice....."

(finks, wots rong wiv fawl ova deuce?)

Looks like that went well Great shots.

I'm well impressed

My efficiency always comes out on the high side so I always check the final OG after the boil and also use the dilution calculator.

http://www.jimsbeerkit.co.uk/calc.html
Why both?

Good stuff!

One question on the PID overshooting....have you run it through the "autotune"procedure as part of your testing?

(It looks like the same one I have to control my HLT and it overshot by a couple of degrees at first, but having it autotune itself sorted it right out - now it only deviates by about 0.1C)

Well done that man

Again good post and a what looks like a good brew day albeit long.


I agree that you have to "Re-circulate at lower flow rates to start with"


and 07:30 60L water on to boil, Made a false bottom for tun with perforated stainless steel while waiting. is the the SS False Bottom a 2mm hole as I need to swap out my 3mm hole to be a copper filter and get a 2mm for my MT

Today has been a bit different!!

Garwatts - thanks for the link, in my haste to get some stock built up, I had completely forgotten about those calculators!!
Irish moss and Protofloc - I have read this in the last two months but I'm damned if I can remember where (age again...)
It is only a pinch of IM so I doubt if it will do any harm. When I run out, I will just use Protofloc alone and see if it makes any difference.

Adm - I had let it autotune, but I think that the somewhat variable flow rate caused it to go wrong. I have let it autotune again and it seems to be doing fine - NOW

Garysmiff - False bottom is 2mm SS, the same as the stuff I put in your thread (from RS), but it's different - NOW

So this is what happened this morning:
Because of the VERY slow drain from the boiler, I doubled the number of holes in the hop filter and opened them out to 2.05mm (from 1.6mm).
Because of the sparge arm blocking yesterday, I drilled extra holes and opened all out to 2.05mm.
Started re-circulating the mash, reasonably slowly, let the PID autotune. The flow rate soon slowed down so much that the heater cannot get enough heat into the return to get it up to temperature. I bailed all the mash out into a FV . Cleared the blockages in the slotted filter, put it back together.
Same thing happened again, bailed out again
The difference today is that I am using Golden Promise, it might have been crushed finer??
Anyway, in a fit of I'll fix this or start drinking, I wrapped the slotted filter in #22 SS mesh, as per Garth's idea and similar to one I stuck up a piccy elsewhere.
I then cut out some more #22 and wrapped it under and round the edge of the perforated SS false bottom, rather like the plunger on a Bodum coffee maker.
Stuck it all back together, tipped the (now about 40C) mash back in, autotune again, and last time I looked it was working perfectly.
(Just checked - beautiful clear wort circulating round at a perfect 66C! )

This one is supposed to be Amarillo as in Crouch Vale and nearly the same as stephenfranks.
Hoping that the rather large amount of Amarillo hops will cover up all the above!

befuggled wrote:
15:10 Cleaning out mash tun, need to find a way to seal round the edge of the false bottom:

Contact Colin (Oxford Brewer) he will have the solution because I've seen it at the bottom of his boiler but can't for the life of me remember what it's called.

Thanks for that garwatts, PM sent!
The SS mesh did work very well yesterday, nothing got through apart from some fine dust.
However, it was a right pain in the arse to clean afterwards!