Day off work. It's time for a brewday.
Today's work of pure genius is going to be a session ale with added Slovenian beauty - thrice hopped with Styrian Goldings. Am trying out the addition of 2% wheat malt as well. I have been tasting a few beers that claim to have this in the ingredient list, so thought I would give it a try.
Beer Engine format recipe is as follows:
Fermentable
Pale Malt 6450 grams 91.8%
Crystal Malt 420 grams 6%
Wheat Malt 140 grams 2%
Chocolate Malt 14 grams 0.2%
Hop Variety
Styrian Goldings 60 mins 100 grams 58.8%
Styrian Goldings 20 mins 50 grams 29.4%
Styrian Goldings 5 mins 20 grams 11.8%
Final Volume: 36 Litres
Original Gravity: 1.042
Final Gravity: 1.010
Alcohol Content: 4.1% ABV
Total Liquor: 55.4 Litres
Mash Liquor: 17.6 Litres
Mash Efficiency: 72 %
Bitterness: 31 EBU
Colour: 20 EBC
Cleaned and prepared everything last night and so it is time to put Mogwai on the CD and get down to business.
Sunny day so, today, I am brewing al fresco - oh yeah.
AG5 - Styrian Madness
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Jon474
Re: AG5 - Styrian Madness
Well, this went reasonably well. It took a lot longer than I imagined - nearly eight hours from the start to the final rinse of the boiler - but I managed to stay calm and in a good mood for most of the time.
It is only AG5 so I am still learning what works and what doesn't in the whole brewing process. I am a bit OCD like that, to be honest. I have very quickly seen the weakness in relying on plastic buckets, taps, washers, boilers etc. There is just not enough strength or security in them. Similarly, moving 50 litres of boiling wort about is just madness. Time for a rethink on the old set-up.
Still...I went into the day wanting 36 litres of beer at 1.042. I came out of the session with 34 litres at 1.045. So, overall, not too bad.
Water treatment went well. I have very low alkalinity water - today's Salifert test reading was 0.83 = 0.91 meq/l - just 45.5mg/litre of CACO3 so only 6.2ml of CRS in 56 litres of brewing liquor. Calculations courtesy of Mr G Wheeler's excellent water treatment programme.
Then I filled up the HLT and started it going in its nice hot water tank jacket - you can see it is sunny, you can't hear Brett Dennan on the CD. Then the first of several minor disasters. In filling the HLT I managed to tip half a litre of water into my digital scales. I didn't realise at the time because I was struggling with 23 litres of HLT so it was only after I had got the HLT switched on and came back to measure up the grain that I noticed something was wrong. Scales are reading 3...-1...6...-3...10...1...4...6 etc. Digital scales knacked, wife out running, children in house (teacher training day), my day could be screwed already. To be honest, the Salter scales I had bought were always a bit rubbish and I was looking for an excuse to trash them and get a new set. I had hoped to be able to do this at a time more convenient to me and not in the middle of brewing session. I did that thing that only men in their forties do, which is to make your arms go rigid, clench your fists and sort of jump up and down on the spot going "No, no, don't do this to me now. Not now". I then decided to see if the scales could be hit back to working properly...they couldn't...and then I decided to see if they could fly. They could. Very well. Quite aerodynamic actually. They just couldn't get the landing quite right. They are definitely broken now. Wife gets back from run so I am off to Tesco in my comedy brewing clothes. People tended to avoid me in the supermarket...which was just fine with me. Not really surprising as I was shuffling around the kitchen section of a major British supermarket, in dodgy clothing, mumbling to myself "Where are the f*cking scales, then?" Still in a good mood though.
Got back to find the HLT boiling away happily to itself...obviously. Strike temperature now exceeded by about 26C. Have to wait for it to cool down. Boiling water really does take a long time to cool down. Quite a long time indeed. Oh yeah. Yep, I spent a long time waiting for that sucker to cool down. Still in a good mood though.
The grain bill...
Grain temperature was 12.9C, GW's strike temperature suggestion was 73.5C. Added 23 litres of mash liquor - I have 4.4 litres of dead space in the mash tun set up I am currently using - and after a really good stir-in - I measured a mash temperature of 66.6C.
So, mash tuns. I have used the picnic box cooler version using which I got mash efficiencies of around 60% - not too good. I have always preferred - and still do - the twin-bucket set up. I get fantastic mash extraction using this method. However, the problem with using two 25 litre buckets for this arrangement is that you can only safely get 20 lites of water in them before the liquor seeps up through the space beyween the buckets and runs out over the table top, over the equipment that you have carefully positioned on the table, into your HLT power supply and finally, onto your feet. Which is, of course, what happened now. Still in a good mood, but with slightly clenched teeth, I set to work mopping up about a litre of slightly sticky mash liquor from everywhere. After a while, Archimedes Principle sorted itself out and the water stopped flowing. I think it might be time to look at the Blichmann mash tun as well as getting a bigger HLT. To brew 40 litres of beer you need equipment that is bigger than 25 litres. Yes, you know this and so do I, now.
Scenes from Titanic over, mash tun insulated and HLT refilled.
Mash went well. Measured the pH after fifteen minutes - somewhere between pH5.2 and pH5.5. That will do for me. For AG5 I altered the way I added the gypsum, calcium chloride and epsom salt treatment minerals. Before I have just been lobbing them into the mash tun and the boiler as a dry powder and just hoping for the best. This time I mixed each batch with about 200ml of boiling water to make up a kind of slurry that i pitched into the tun and the kettle. It seemed to go into suspension a lot easier - and it was visually possible to see it well-dispersed in the liquor.
I tend to monitor the mash as it goes on by taking refractometer readings every 15 minutes or so and the readings came out as:
13:00 6.2 Brix
13:30 13.8
13:45 15.8
14:00 17.8
14:15 18.8
Now at this point I should have been draining the mash tun but the bloody HLT had not yet heated up to 77C so I had to wait an additional ten minutes.
15:25 18.8 - so this was confirmation that extraction had pretty much finished anyway.
Temperature of the mash after 105 minutes was...
Go figure.
OG of first runnings was 1.066 at a measured temperature of 50.4C which gives a corrected gravity of 1.077. This is obviously a bit higher than I was expecting. I batch sparge and tend to measure the gravity after each batch until I get bored. This is to ensure that the runnings are still above 1.020. I was down to runnings of 1.038 when the mash got stuck. Try as I might I could not get any more out of it and it looked as though I would be a fair few litres short of my desired 45 litres into the kettle. I did some quick calculations and lobbed in 15 litres of treated but unused brewing liquor - I had suspected that 56 wouldn't be enough when I saw the first runnings. That brought my starting pre-boil volume to about 45 litres at 1.038. I figured that would be enough to get close to the target of 1.042 post-boil.
Boil started it was time to measure out the hops. I had found a 100g in a brewing shop in Ormesby a few weeks before which needed to get used up because they weren't vacuum packed and I got another 125g from H&G. I used the older hops for the bittering - topped up with 15g of "fresh" hops to try and replace some of the lost alphas.
About fifteen minutes into the boil the kettle tap started leaking. Leaking quite badly. On inspection the plastic washer had become deformed - probably happened when I moved the kettle away from the conservatory door to stop the inevitable condensation runing the the wife's new blinds. This is where I stopped being in quite such a good mood. I had to disconnect the kettle, bale out into an FV, detach the matrix from its now very very hot stainless steel connector, fix the tap, reassemble the matrix and refill the boiler. Hot side aeration? Don't talk to me about aerating hot wort. This beer will have no long-term keeping qualities - good job it's going in a keg for immediate drinking.
Rest of the boil was uneventful, but expensive. I found that I needed two elements working full time to keep a ten-gallon batch boiling vigorously. Time to invest in a propane burner set-up?
60 minute hops, 20 minute hops, Protofloc in at 15 minutes, 5 minute hops. In a change to the original recipe, I stuck in another 15g of hops once the temperature had dropped below 90C. The Sytrians smell so good. I nearly went in the kettle after them at one point. I am back in a really good mood now.
Chilled it down using my comedy IC. Some things can be too big, and this is one of them. I need to make a smaller one. The picture is a bit grainy because it was getting dark now. It would be pitch black outside by the time I had finished washing out the kettle.
I like to rack the beer off the hot break and trub before I cool it down. Cooling went well - down to 26C in about ten minutes. I then like to transfer the cooled beer into the fermenting vessel and pitch the yeast starter. Then I remembered something that I wanted to do after AG4 - find a way of racking the cooled beer off the cold break. Since I started using Protofloc I have never seen so much cold break material. I need to find a matrix, or some sort of filter, to let me do this. I always end up with cold break material in the fermeting vessel and in the yeast head. I never know whether to skim or not. In general, I don't skim anything from the beer but always worry that I should.
Measured the OG at 1.045. Just a bit over my target of 1.042
I don't aerate the cooled beer as I prefer to do all the aeration in the yeast starter as it is growing. This starter was a second (or maybe a third?) generation WLP005 batch. Tiny amount of olive oil into the starter last week and a lot of aeration of the starter during the growth phase. Drained off the spent wort this morning and restarted it with about a litre of wort collected about thirty minutes into the boil.
After about five hours the beer looked like this...
After twenty hours it looked like this...
So it's on its way.
Sorry that this was such a long post. I have used this forum as the space to write up my notes of the day. Quite a few learning points from the session. I need to re-think my equipment or just accept that I have to brew smaller batches. Now, what can I do for AG6?
It is only AG5 so I am still learning what works and what doesn't in the whole brewing process. I am a bit OCD like that, to be honest. I have very quickly seen the weakness in relying on plastic buckets, taps, washers, boilers etc. There is just not enough strength or security in them. Similarly, moving 50 litres of boiling wort about is just madness. Time for a rethink on the old set-up.
Still...I went into the day wanting 36 litres of beer at 1.042. I came out of the session with 34 litres at 1.045. So, overall, not too bad.
Water treatment went well. I have very low alkalinity water - today's Salifert test reading was 0.83 = 0.91 meq/l - just 45.5mg/litre of CACO3 so only 6.2ml of CRS in 56 litres of brewing liquor. Calculations courtesy of Mr G Wheeler's excellent water treatment programme.
Then I filled up the HLT and started it going in its nice hot water tank jacket - you can see it is sunny, you can't hear Brett Dennan on the CD. Then the first of several minor disasters. In filling the HLT I managed to tip half a litre of water into my digital scales. I didn't realise at the time because I was struggling with 23 litres of HLT so it was only after I had got the HLT switched on and came back to measure up the grain that I noticed something was wrong. Scales are reading 3...-1...6...-3...10...1...4...6 etc. Digital scales knacked, wife out running, children in house (teacher training day), my day could be screwed already. To be honest, the Salter scales I had bought were always a bit rubbish and I was looking for an excuse to trash them and get a new set. I had hoped to be able to do this at a time more convenient to me and not in the middle of brewing session. I did that thing that only men in their forties do, which is to make your arms go rigid, clench your fists and sort of jump up and down on the spot going "No, no, don't do this to me now. Not now". I then decided to see if the scales could be hit back to working properly...they couldn't...and then I decided to see if they could fly. They could. Very well. Quite aerodynamic actually. They just couldn't get the landing quite right. They are definitely broken now. Wife gets back from run so I am off to Tesco in my comedy brewing clothes. People tended to avoid me in the supermarket...which was just fine with me. Not really surprising as I was shuffling around the kitchen section of a major British supermarket, in dodgy clothing, mumbling to myself "Where are the f*cking scales, then?" Still in a good mood though.
Got back to find the HLT boiling away happily to itself...obviously. Strike temperature now exceeded by about 26C. Have to wait for it to cool down. Boiling water really does take a long time to cool down. Quite a long time indeed. Oh yeah. Yep, I spent a long time waiting for that sucker to cool down. Still in a good mood though.
The grain bill...
Grain temperature was 12.9C, GW's strike temperature suggestion was 73.5C. Added 23 litres of mash liquor - I have 4.4 litres of dead space in the mash tun set up I am currently using - and after a really good stir-in - I measured a mash temperature of 66.6C.
So, mash tuns. I have used the picnic box cooler version using which I got mash efficiencies of around 60% - not too good. I have always preferred - and still do - the twin-bucket set up. I get fantastic mash extraction using this method. However, the problem with using two 25 litre buckets for this arrangement is that you can only safely get 20 lites of water in them before the liquor seeps up through the space beyween the buckets and runs out over the table top, over the equipment that you have carefully positioned on the table, into your HLT power supply and finally, onto your feet. Which is, of course, what happened now. Still in a good mood, but with slightly clenched teeth, I set to work mopping up about a litre of slightly sticky mash liquor from everywhere. After a while, Archimedes Principle sorted itself out and the water stopped flowing. I think it might be time to look at the Blichmann mash tun as well as getting a bigger HLT. To brew 40 litres of beer you need equipment that is bigger than 25 litres. Yes, you know this and so do I, now.
Scenes from Titanic over, mash tun insulated and HLT refilled.
Mash went well. Measured the pH after fifteen minutes - somewhere between pH5.2 and pH5.5. That will do for me. For AG5 I altered the way I added the gypsum, calcium chloride and epsom salt treatment minerals. Before I have just been lobbing them into the mash tun and the boiler as a dry powder and just hoping for the best. This time I mixed each batch with about 200ml of boiling water to make up a kind of slurry that i pitched into the tun and the kettle. It seemed to go into suspension a lot easier - and it was visually possible to see it well-dispersed in the liquor.
I tend to monitor the mash as it goes on by taking refractometer readings every 15 minutes or so and the readings came out as:
13:00 6.2 Brix
13:30 13.8
13:45 15.8
14:00 17.8
14:15 18.8
Now at this point I should have been draining the mash tun but the bloody HLT had not yet heated up to 77C so I had to wait an additional ten minutes.
15:25 18.8 - so this was confirmation that extraction had pretty much finished anyway.
Temperature of the mash after 105 minutes was...
Go figure.
OG of first runnings was 1.066 at a measured temperature of 50.4C which gives a corrected gravity of 1.077. This is obviously a bit higher than I was expecting. I batch sparge and tend to measure the gravity after each batch until I get bored. This is to ensure that the runnings are still above 1.020. I was down to runnings of 1.038 when the mash got stuck. Try as I might I could not get any more out of it and it looked as though I would be a fair few litres short of my desired 45 litres into the kettle. I did some quick calculations and lobbed in 15 litres of treated but unused brewing liquor - I had suspected that 56 wouldn't be enough when I saw the first runnings. That brought my starting pre-boil volume to about 45 litres at 1.038. I figured that would be enough to get close to the target of 1.042 post-boil.
Boil started it was time to measure out the hops. I had found a 100g in a brewing shop in Ormesby a few weeks before which needed to get used up because they weren't vacuum packed and I got another 125g from H&G. I used the older hops for the bittering - topped up with 15g of "fresh" hops to try and replace some of the lost alphas.
About fifteen minutes into the boil the kettle tap started leaking. Leaking quite badly. On inspection the plastic washer had become deformed - probably happened when I moved the kettle away from the conservatory door to stop the inevitable condensation runing the the wife's new blinds. This is where I stopped being in quite such a good mood. I had to disconnect the kettle, bale out into an FV, detach the matrix from its now very very hot stainless steel connector, fix the tap, reassemble the matrix and refill the boiler. Hot side aeration? Don't talk to me about aerating hot wort. This beer will have no long-term keeping qualities - good job it's going in a keg for immediate drinking.
Rest of the boil was uneventful, but expensive. I found that I needed two elements working full time to keep a ten-gallon batch boiling vigorously. Time to invest in a propane burner set-up?
60 minute hops, 20 minute hops, Protofloc in at 15 minutes, 5 minute hops. In a change to the original recipe, I stuck in another 15g of hops once the temperature had dropped below 90C. The Sytrians smell so good. I nearly went in the kettle after them at one point. I am back in a really good mood now.
Chilled it down using my comedy IC. Some things can be too big, and this is one of them. I need to make a smaller one. The picture is a bit grainy because it was getting dark now. It would be pitch black outside by the time I had finished washing out the kettle.
I like to rack the beer off the hot break and trub before I cool it down. Cooling went well - down to 26C in about ten minutes. I then like to transfer the cooled beer into the fermenting vessel and pitch the yeast starter. Then I remembered something that I wanted to do after AG4 - find a way of racking the cooled beer off the cold break. Since I started using Protofloc I have never seen so much cold break material. I need to find a matrix, or some sort of filter, to let me do this. I always end up with cold break material in the fermeting vessel and in the yeast head. I never know whether to skim or not. In general, I don't skim anything from the beer but always worry that I should.
Measured the OG at 1.045. Just a bit over my target of 1.042
I don't aerate the cooled beer as I prefer to do all the aeration in the yeast starter as it is growing. This starter was a second (or maybe a third?) generation WLP005 batch. Tiny amount of olive oil into the starter last week and a lot of aeration of the starter during the growth phase. Drained off the spent wort this morning and restarted it with about a litre of wort collected about thirty minutes into the boil.
After about five hours the beer looked like this...
After twenty hours it looked like this...
So it's on its way.
Sorry that this was such a long post. I have used this forum as the space to write up my notes of the day. Quite a few learning points from the session. I need to re-think my equipment or just accept that I have to brew smaller batches. Now, what can I do for AG6?
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micmacmoc
Re: AG5 - Styrian Madness
blimey what a day!
All credit for you not going insanse and going on a rampage of revenge!
I keep looking to up my brewlength but then see the mess I'm making with 23lt and realise how much worse I would be with double that!
Your recipe looks a good'un, I could murder a pint of hat right now.
All credit for you not going insanse and going on a rampage of revenge!
I keep looking to up my brewlength but then see the mess I'm making with 23lt and realise how much worse I would be with double that!
Your recipe looks a good'un, I could murder a pint of hat right now.
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DrewBrews
Re: AG5 - Styrian Madness
Olive oil in the starter is an interesting one. I've read about doing this.
Have you ever tried a side by side comparison of a starter with and without olive oil? Do you think it really works/makes a difference?
Have you ever tried a side by side comparison of a starter with and without olive oil? Do you think it really works/makes a difference?
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Jon474
Re: AG5 - Styrian Madness
Thanks micmacmoc: I really did stay cheerful throughout because I was too busy working out what new kit or new processes I needed to solve the underlying problems I was having. I had to go and have a few beers afterwards though. Drinking Ringwood Old Thumper. Lovely ale which quickly put the day into perspective. I'm going to have a go at making something like that soon.
Re olive oil: I don't know. I really don't know. Lots of people say that do know, and that they know that it doesn't work. I like to believe it does work. I want to think this because the science behind it makes sense to me so that probably clouds my view. I don't like oxygenating wort. Hot side or cold side. That science definitely makes sense to me. Oxygenating the yeast starter as much as I can makes much more sense. I do this as a matter of course and I stick a tiny amount of oil in just in case that works too. Every little helps! I tip away the horribly oxygenated spent wort prior to pitching as I don't want that liquor anywhere near my finished beer. What is not yet clear to me is how important aerating cold wort could be to the actual final taste of the beer. What does the oxygen contribute to the esters and other flavour compounds?
Yes, I have tried two starters one with oil and one without...again, I have no scientific evidence to back this up, but it seemed to me that the one with oil took off sooner. The picture is after just two hours and that yeast is seriously active. It was actually moving up and down the jar in waves.
Performance of the starter with oil wasn't better overall - in the long run they both worked well, but I felt that the one with oil kicked off sooner and harder. I did feel that AG4, which I made using no cold side aeration and oil in the starter and a tiny, tiny amount in the cooled wort, fermented for longer. That WLP005 yeast is still working hard. Although it went into a cask on 7 March, in hindsight a bit too early having spent just ten days in the FV, the cask (a ten litre food-grade jerry can - see picture) keeps on bulging. For the first few days I vented it gently to get the air out but I have left alone now for ten days and it seems to be calming down at last. I have used olive oil and no cold side aeration in AG5 and it took off in less than five hours. I see no downsides in terms of lag time by not aerating the cold wort .
What I really enjoy about this hobby is the try-it-and-see aspect of it all. Given that there are so many variables from start to finish it would be difficult to pin down a small change on one thing anyway...but it's fun to give it a try? I am interested in the oxygen and flavour thing though, so will be looking into that more carefully.
Re olive oil: I don't know. I really don't know. Lots of people say that do know, and that they know that it doesn't work. I like to believe it does work. I want to think this because the science behind it makes sense to me so that probably clouds my view. I don't like oxygenating wort. Hot side or cold side. That science definitely makes sense to me. Oxygenating the yeast starter as much as I can makes much more sense. I do this as a matter of course and I stick a tiny amount of oil in just in case that works too. Every little helps! I tip away the horribly oxygenated spent wort prior to pitching as I don't want that liquor anywhere near my finished beer. What is not yet clear to me is how important aerating cold wort could be to the actual final taste of the beer. What does the oxygen contribute to the esters and other flavour compounds?
Yes, I have tried two starters one with oil and one without...again, I have no scientific evidence to back this up, but it seemed to me that the one with oil took off sooner. The picture is after just two hours and that yeast is seriously active. It was actually moving up and down the jar in waves.
Performance of the starter with oil wasn't better overall - in the long run they both worked well, but I felt that the one with oil kicked off sooner and harder. I did feel that AG4, which I made using no cold side aeration and oil in the starter and a tiny, tiny amount in the cooled wort, fermented for longer. That WLP005 yeast is still working hard. Although it went into a cask on 7 March, in hindsight a bit too early having spent just ten days in the FV, the cask (a ten litre food-grade jerry can - see picture) keeps on bulging. For the first few days I vented it gently to get the air out but I have left alone now for ten days and it seems to be calming down at last. I have used olive oil and no cold side aeration in AG5 and it took off in less than five hours. I see no downsides in terms of lag time by not aerating the cold wort .
What I really enjoy about this hobby is the try-it-and-see aspect of it all. Given that there are so many variables from start to finish it would be difficult to pin down a small change on one thing anyway...but it's fun to give it a try? I am interested in the oxygen and flavour thing though, so will be looking into that more carefully.
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Jon474
Re: AG5 - Styrian Madness (ooh 'ee's gorgeous)
I am in love with this beer. Put about 25 litres into a King Keg tonight. Primed with about 50g of DME. Siphoned it in rather than using the tap. I had a couple of frustrating unscheduled stops and so had to start it off again. Overall, though, it seemed to go okay. I could probably have got another litre out if I had been a bit more careful. Styrian Madness will stay in this cask for about three weeks and then I am going to drink it until I fall over.
FG 1.011 which, from a starting OG of 1.045, gives me 4.5% ABV. Respectable and not bad for a “no-aeration†beer.
Taste is great. Lovely hoppy aroma, very late on hoppy flavour at the top of the mouth – actually reminds me very much of the style of Wychwood’s beers - quite a deep bitterness at the back and sides of the tongue. Nice feel to the beer in the mouth. Just the right amount of residual sweetness. I am pleased with the colour. I was surprised that it looked so clear but close up you can see that it does need to settle out some more.
Here are a couple of pictures of the last runnings…
Tossed the yeast this time as this was the third generation from the batch of WLP005 I used for AG2. Time for some fresh blood.
Going to do a shout out for Allans Home Brew on the corner of Beaumont Road in Ormesby, Middlesbrough. I wouldn’t source my main ingredients from there as the only two suppliers are Young’s and Ritchie’s but for emergency supplies of stuff you have suddenly found you have run out of, and for a good range of very reasonably priced fermenting vessels, barrels, bottle tops, seals etc I think it is a great shop. Really friendly and helpful lady who runs it.
FG 1.011 which, from a starting OG of 1.045, gives me 4.5% ABV. Respectable and not bad for a “no-aeration†beer.
Taste is great. Lovely hoppy aroma, very late on hoppy flavour at the top of the mouth – actually reminds me very much of the style of Wychwood’s beers - quite a deep bitterness at the back and sides of the tongue. Nice feel to the beer in the mouth. Just the right amount of residual sweetness. I am pleased with the colour. I was surprised that it looked so clear but close up you can see that it does need to settle out some more.
Here are a couple of pictures of the last runnings…
Tossed the yeast this time as this was the third generation from the batch of WLP005 I used for AG2. Time for some fresh blood.
Going to do a shout out for Allans Home Brew on the corner of Beaumont Road in Ormesby, Middlesbrough. I wouldn’t source my main ingredients from there as the only two suppliers are Young’s and Ritchie’s but for emergency supplies of stuff you have suddenly found you have run out of, and for a good range of very reasonably priced fermenting vessels, barrels, bottle tops, seals etc I think it is a great shop. Really friendly and helpful lady who runs it.
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adm
Re: AG5 - Styrian Madness
Nice work that man!
The funny thing is, it always seems to be the beers with the "not quite perfect" brewdays that come out the best (for me anyway). Necessity being the mother of something or other....
The funny thing is, it always seems to be the beers with the "not quite perfect" brewdays that come out the best (for me anyway). Necessity being the mother of something or other....
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Jon474
Re: AG5 - Styrian Madness
Thanks for the kind words. I am pleased with this one. I felt good about it on the day and I am happy that nothing I got wrong seems to have had a noticeable effect on the beer...so far. I have learned now that my brewing set up is the wrong way round. I am using a 25L HLT and a 50L boiler. I want to brew smaller lengths...a maximum of 23L in an FV would do me fine. So, I am going to reverse the process and use the 10-gal kettle as my HLT. Also thinking about a 26 US gallon s/s boiler from Morebeer in the States on a gas burner. That's for after the Summer though. Immediate project is to rework my IC and construct a filter to screen out some of the cold break from the cooling vessel. Happy days.
I think you are right about how bad days of brewing usually produce the better beers. It is probably because in reality brewing is in such a forgiving process - within reason - and so although we are sweating about the stuff that seems major to us and a disaster when it goes wrong, it is actually pretty minor when it comes to the actual performance/outcome of the brew. It probably helps the beer to have us concentrating on the small stuff whilst missing the really important things that we could have got wrong.
Now, need a recipe for an Easter Ale...
I think you are right about how bad days of brewing usually produce the better beers. It is probably because in reality brewing is in such a forgiving process - within reason - and so although we are sweating about the stuff that seems major to us and a disaster when it goes wrong, it is actually pretty minor when it comes to the actual performance/outcome of the brew. It probably helps the beer to have us concentrating on the small stuff whilst missing the really important things that we could have got wrong.
Now, need a recipe for an Easter Ale...
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mysterio
Re: AG5 - Styrian Madness
Great write up!
Oxygenation of wort vs starter, amounts of oxygen and so on is an interesting topic. I wish I could control it a bit more by taking dissolved oxygen readings of the wort but it's anyones guess how much O2 i'm actually getting in solution.
What I will say is that some of my best results come from a) building up a large amount of of well-aerated yeast from a liquid culture via a stir plate and/or b) repitching yeast through generations. The olive oil thing, I think I read New Belgium got increased ester production from the yeast using this method. Never tried it so i'm not knocking it.
Oxygenation of wort vs starter, amounts of oxygen and so on is an interesting topic. I wish I could control it a bit more by taking dissolved oxygen readings of the wort but it's anyones guess how much O2 i'm actually getting in solution.
What I will say is that some of my best results come from a) building up a large amount of of well-aerated yeast from a liquid culture via a stir plate and/or b) repitching yeast through generations. The olive oil thing, I think I read New Belgium got increased ester production from the yeast using this method. Never tried it so i'm not knocking it.