I weighed the grains and filled and treated the water in the HLT last night and set it to come on at 6.30am, so emerging into a foggy morning at 9.00am (coffee in hand) I was ready to get a mash on! Firstly though, here is one key upgrade since last time - the pipes of joy:
40mm waste pipes with push-fit connectors and a wras approved water pipe - Its just sooo much easier to have water and a drain to the garage, instead of trundling it all there and back on a trolley. Its just a temporary thing I will lay out on brew-days but the time taken to do so is well worth it.
The recipe is quite simple comprising pale malt flaked and roasted barley and only has 90min hops (target):
This time I was working on a steam extraction pipe so didn't have time to take many pics, but having learnt its characteristics last time it all just ran as expected which save loads of messing around. This time the HLT temp was 90c which gave a strike temp (after 20mins to warm the MT thoroughly) of 74c and resulted in a mash temp of 66c. No fannying about with kettles!
The sparge liquor was heated to 80c this time and 'eventually' achieved a grain bed temperature of 77c towards the end. It was steady once reached but took most of the sparge time to raise it to that though - mostly it was more towards the original mash temperature. I'm used to it happening more quickly with the old setup; not sure what affect that slow heating rate is likely to have?
Then the next key improvement - after showering in dirty condensation dripping from the ceiling last time, I set up an extraction pipe. By chance I'd just got a new waste for the kitchen sink, so I used the old one to attach waste pipe to my lid - took some effort to make a 4" hole in the stainless though. If I hadn't got this I'd intended to use a 32 or 40mm plastic tank connector from B&Q that Boingy used for his setup. As it was mine has an outer and inner, so I had to fill it with silicone to stop nasties hiding in there.
And this is the pipe leading from it - downwards so that condensation doesn't run back to the boiler, it sagged a lot when it warmed up but seems to be standing up to it:
And here is the outlet doing its job - lots of condensation running out as well as steam hence having it in the gulley:
EDIT: This extraction thing later failed because on bubblier brews I couldn't stop the bubbles rising up, and they caused it to get blocked with hops.
The IC is now on, so it'll have taken about 7hrs all told for the 40L brew - comprising a 90min mash, a 90min sparge (I set it a bit slower than intended) and a 90min boil. 1.5 of the remainder were waiting to reach the boil, about 1/2 an hour into the cooling stage and about the same again has gone into prattling about in between everything. Considerably better than last time!!
The final innovation is my new toy for emptying the boiler in place. The boiler is heavy and awkward so cleaning it out was the worst part of the last brew day hopefully this should make it easier:
I got it from from wickes as an early christmas present, people have rated it highly on the wickes site so hopefully it'll work in this application.
Cheers
Kev
