Recipe, Method and Madness...
Grain Bill
3180g French pils from Soufflet
340g
Belgian Biscuit from Malterie du Chateau EBC 50
120g
Belgian Ambre from Malterie du Chateau EBC 50
250g medium crystal (Home made, uncertain of EBC - guessing 40 EBC?)
350g vienna (Home made, guess EBC of about 6-8?)
380g unmalted barley. (more on the why later!)
Here's that lot milled...
Hop Schedule and Method
8g Northern brewer @ 55 mins
8g Northern brewer @ 35 mins
10g Cascade @ 20 minutes
10g Cascade @ 5 minutes
Hops and my yeast starter getting bubbles.
Was aiming for a strike temp of 64.4, hit 62.9 with a mash volume of 10.5 litres. It was just under so in went another two litres of hot water to get my target. Wrapped it up and left it for an hour. This was a deliberately low mash temp and I was aiming for maximum fermentability and as crisp/clean a flavour profile as possible.
I'd added in the raw barley to bring back a little lighter colour as I was shooting for a golden brown beer. A lot of grain in this bill with no innate conversion capability so I did an iodine test @60 minutes... purple haze. Bah, needed more time.
Left it another 20 minutes and it had all fully converted.
Recirculated the first two litres then started to collect the beginnings of the clear runnings.
Here's a snap of the runnings as I was taking them. Left to right...
after 5 mins 1080 (not as clear as I thought!)
20 mins 1078 (slightly turbid)
35 mins 1052 (lovely and settled)
45 mins 1035 (looks like lager now!)
I took 8 litres in 45 mins as my net average sparge rate using my rugged hybrid fly-sparge technique. Looking at the samples the fourth one was taken after I'd been a bit too vigorous with the sparge and it'd gone a touch cloudy. I continued to fly sparge until I was hitting 1010 on the runnings.
23.5 litres in to the boil. Huge hot break flourish when it came up to the boil and I had it rolling very hard in a 50 litre pot... and it was almost leaping out of top. I'm using a 10kW propane burner and it's a bit too much when it's on full chat. Losses to trub, the boil and the hop additions where brutal so my finished wort was coming out at a mind bending 1050. Damn. Diluted back to 20 litres and about 1044 when I pitched a 700ml starter of Nottingham that had been running on an airstone.
Managed to do home made fish'n'chips and wash it all down with a glass (or two) of my 'Chat Noir' mild, the topic of a
previous brewday.
Good brewday (which ran on well into the late evening) and I'll of course report back on progress of the fermentation, bottling and tasting. it's fairly light no mad bittering or outrageous hopping, plenty of readily fermented food for the yeast so I'm guessing 5 days in primary, racked off to secondary for a week to settle, and then two weeks bottle conditioning before it's ready in early July.