The brewing started mid afternoon by the time we'd got ourselves sorted and round to my mate's place.
First up the grain all weighed out
This went into the mash tun at 15:38 and started mashing at 68C
After the 90 mins were up (temperature dropping down to 66C, so that wasn't too bad) we drained the mash tun and then added the water for the sparge. With the boiler now clear we could add the wort to the boiler (an old 5gallon Baby Burco) and start getting that back up to boil. Testing the pre-boil gravity it was about 1.030@45C which gives about 1.038 when corrected for temerature.
The first hops were weighed out
and added when the boiler had almost got to the boil. We decided a bit more insulation for the boiler was needed and tied a space blanket round the outside. Not sure if it did anything much buy we can work on that.
We then went inside as it was getting distinctly cold in the garage.
About the right time (75 mins later) we went back to add the 2nd hops and irish moss
[img]https://lh5.googleusercontent.com/_e4kH ... ps.jpg[img]
The boiler was going away nicely by now with a good rolling boil, perhaps we should have been a bit more patient earlier.
At the end of the 90mins, we realised that a hop strainer hadn't been worked into boiler so ran the wort out into a fermenter through a sieve and added the post boil hops that are called for in the recipe. The post boil gravity was tested and found to be 1.031@60C - 1.046 corrected for temperature (not too shabby for a first go when the recipe gives 1.049).
We covered the fermenter and decided to leave overnight to cool.
The following morning we siphoned into another fermenter to try and get the break material out and ended up with about 15l of wort with a gravity of 1.047 A few litres shy of the target (19l) but almost spot on the gravity we were after.
A sachet of S-04 yeast was added to the wort and now we just wait for that to do it's work.
So what went right and not so right?
right - we got the gravity pretty much spot on and the home made bucket in bucket mash tun worked very well
not so right - should have been better about measuring liquids for mash, sparge etc. The boiler could do with insulating. More accurate about timing when the wort hits boiling (is it when a rolling boil is achieved?). Maybe better scales are needed for the weighing of the hops.
Still all in all a good afternoon was had and hopefully some very drinkable beer will be sampled in the near future.
Phil
