Home Brew Forum

Lovely day in London yesterday, perfect for brewing in. So I did. I even dug out the camera.

Here's the recipe...

23 litres
3.15 kg Maris Otter
380g Crystal 120
80g Chocolate
80g Brown Malt (this is a new addition.)
25g Boadicea 6.8% (90mins)
8g EKG 5% (15mins)
8g Fuggles, homegrown (15mins)
WLP023
Wirlifloc

and the pics....

The yeast. I use WLP023 in just about everything these days. This is a bottle from a split vial made a couple of months ago, added to 800ml of malt. It's been on the stirplate for 24hrs:


Filling the HLT:


The uncrushed grains, looking peachy in the sunlight:


The drill doing its thing at 180rpm:


The crushed grains:


Filling the mash tun at 85°C:


It dropped below strike temperature, so I had to warm it up again:


Dodgy-looking scales:


Mash on, and a lovely chocolately smell:


Mash temp was 68.7°C, higher than I wanted. On the other hand WLP023 is a pretty ferocious yeast, so this'll give it something to bite on.

PH looks about right. Perhaps a bit low? I'm not very good at reading these strips.


Some picturesque cobwebs to admire while we wait:


After the mash, the run-off. Unusually I got a stuck mash, perhaps because I let the grains settle for too long:


The hops. Almost the last of my homegrown Fuggles from last autumn:


The boil:




After the boil I use this little immersion chiller to take the temp down to 80°C, then let everything settle for 20mins:


The run-off:


OG spot on at 1035:


Revealed: the reason why so many hop leaves made it into the fermenter:


Yeast pitched and fermenter put into fridge at 20°C. These days I control the temperature by wedging a probe between the fermenter and a sponge:


All done! Just some finishing touches to add to the post-brew curry. Here's the garam masala roasting in a pan:


And the final product, a midnight chicken tikka masala:


Very nice, though I say it myself. Cheers!

Nice set up and good curry! This may interest you if you haven't yet seen it: viewtopic.php?f=15&t=37333&hilit=style

Thanks Floyd. And thanks for the link. Your curries look absolutely delicious.

I've tried making curry sauce by boiling the onions, as recommended in The Curry Secret, but it didn't work for me. At least, mine came out all silky and lacking that deep curry flavour. So I fry them instead for as long as I can stand, then add tomatoes and simmer for a couple of hours. That seems to work.

On the other hand if everyone else gets good results from boiling then I'm probably just getting it wrong somehow.

Nice brew day!

Cheers
kev

You really did get the camera out, nice
It is still Mild month too, is this a recipe you've done before?

Yeah, in fact I've just finished a keg of it, and it was so nice I wanted more at once. It's about 3%, rather dry and very chocolatey. Absolutely delicious. But this time I added a bit of Brown Malt just to see what it's like.

Hogarth wrote:Some picturesque cobwebs to admire while we wait:

Are you practicing storing and harvesting yeast for a farm-house-style 'wild yeast' beer?

Yeah, I've just got to poke some holes in the roof and I'll be set.

Seriously, next brewday I shall devote myself to cleaning away the cobwebs instead of taking pictures of them.

great stuff, your stirplate looks like its got some serious rev's on it love the pics gives me somthing to do whilst I mash

Thanks Gary!

A couple of nights ago there was a loud bang, which I attributed to somebody getting shot on the street outside. But in the morning I discovered that the fermenter had blown its lid off -- like a wally I had sealed it tight. No harm done. The lid was all bent and inside out, but I managed to get it back into shape, more or less. The joys of a plastic fermenter!

Fermentation has now stopped at 1010, which seems about right. Beginning to taste nice already. I reckon I'll be drinking this within a week.

Hi!

Looks liek a good brew day! I might half-inch your mild recipe too!

How do you get on with WLP-023? I used itonce nad love the flavour profile, but find it a bit slow to settle out...
Do you find this improves with re pitching?

Cheers!

Guy

Lovely pics, but what is inside that tupperware box? If that is what I think it is - an IEC cable in there carrying mains then it looks a little bit lethal.

I'm no expert, but the yellow pH strip looks like it's dropped off the end of the scale and the blue one seems to read 4.8. This seems a bit low - at room temperature the mash temp should be around 5.8 - 6.0, according to Palmer's chart thingy.

And I'm very jealous of your grain crushing. I bet that smells lovely.

A bit lethal? Probably ... but only a bit. It's a Tesco kettle element inside a clipbox:



I know it looks alarming, and I wouldn't encourage anyone to build one, but I'm happy to use it. The box is robust and watertight, it is transparent so I would see if any water got inside, and the element is fully earthed and PID'd. I use it for about 30 seconds and never take my eye off it. Frankly, I can't see that it is any more dangerous than fixing an element into the side of a plastic vessel. Less so, perhaps, because there's no water pressure, and I'm always watching it.

PH -- yeah, I think you might be right. It's a bit below 5. But aren't we aiming for 5.3?

Manx -- WLP023 is great stuff, isn't it! I use it in everything -- pale ales, milds, and porters. It gives the beer a pleasant, fruity sort of taste, like pears or honey. Sometimes it's a bit sulphury, which I also like, although this usually disappears. It goes off like a rocket and never needs rousing. Sometimes it clears well and sometimes it doesn't, but I've taken to chilling my beers in the fermenter and then using isinglass, which does the trick.

I've never tried harvesting or repitching, though. I simply buy a vial, split it into six, and use each of these in turn.

I can't tell from the one photo, but it may not be a bad idea to enclose your stir-plate in a similar plastic container.
I had a pop-bang and fireworks in my lounge room because the yeast-starter had over-flowed the container, dripped down onto the fan and shorted out the electrics inside it, so unless yours is covered on the top (not just the wooden box on the outside) it could suffer something similar.

Hogarth wrote:It's a Tesco kettle element inside a clipbox:

I know it looks alarming, and I wouldn't encourage anyone to build one, but I'm happy to use it. The box is robust and watertight, it is transparent so I would see if any water got inside, and the element is fully earthed and PID'd. I use it for about 30 seconds and never take my eye off it. Frankly, I can't see that it is any more dangerous than fixing an element into the side of a plastic vessel. Less so, perhaps, because there's no water pressure, and I'm always watching it.

Fair enough I guess, and I have to say that I quite fancy something like that for all the times I put the water in the MT and I find out it's a couple of degrees below strike. But with the element in that position you are restricting the flow of water round a 2.4KW heater, directing the heat into a plastic box with exposed mains inside, floating in water. That sounds quite bad to me, but if you are happy with that...

PH -- yeah, I think you might be right. It's a bit below 5. But aren't we aiming for 5.3?

Yeah, sorry, went a bit mental there, but the room temperature reading needs to have 0.35 knocked off it to equal the mash temperature reading, so to get a mash temperature pH of 5.3 you should have a room temp reading of 5.6 - 5.7. That's my understanding of how these things work, anyway. I could be wrong.