Home Brew Forum

I set the alarm for 6am intending to get up and get cracking but a combination of too much booze last night and the fact that it was flippin' cold meant that I didn't even scrape my backside out of bed till 7am! On top of the late start, my son has picked today to to be ill so I was trying to keep him occupied and brew at the same time!

Foolishly I didn't allow for the sub zero temperatures when calculating liquor temps and by the time I'd drained the HLT into the mash tun it had lost almost 5ºc so some frantic kettle boiling was needed to get it close to strike temp! I ended up missing mash temp by 1ºc but I put that down to the grain cooling down while I was farting about with the kettle! despite this my mash efficiency was at 83%

The rest of the brew went swimmingly and I ended up 1 point off my target SG. Looking forward to supping this one!

Obligatory grain shot:


Pellet power


First runnings


Think Ive found the limits of my mash tun!


SG:


Aeration anyone?

Looking good, Dave..................and about 7% ABV when finished

Beer engine seems to think its going to finish high (1.021) but using S04 Ive not had a beer finish above 1.012 so we shall see!

Tharr she blows!

What is the recipe? YOu could always return the liquor to the HLT and consider it a mash tun preheating!

I did consider that but not till after I'd mashed the grain in!

The recipe was as follows: (I should have put it in the 1st post but forgot!)

That is some black and bitter stuff!

pdtnc wrote:That is some black and bitter stuff!

Just the way it should be! It smells amazing! in fact, the whole kitchen smells absolutely bloomin' marvelous right now!!

Yeast monster-tastic

Biggest problem I'm going to have is keeping my hands off it! pale ales are easy because you can see that the yeast hasnt settled and so convince yourself that its just not ready yet but stouts aren't so easy to put back in the crate!!

Another gusher this morning! starting to worry about the amount of booze Im losing now. On a positive note, Emma has agreed that I need some bigger FV's to prevent this happening again!

bigdave wrote:Another gusher this morning! starting to worry about the amount of booze Im losing now. On a positive note, Emma has agreed that I need some bigger FV's to prevent this happening again!

I shall have to suggest that to my Emma too!

Hehehe. Shes also asked if theres a way I can condense the amount of brewing gear Ive got, so I suggested replacing 100 odd bottles with a couple of king kegs.... she's said yes (but thats before she sees what they cost!!).

Get cornies

That really would be a massive no. Shes daft but not that daft. shiny = expensive.