Home Brew Forum

Well it has begun. I'm going to try and update this thread during my brew, no doubt a bit boring for the experienced brewers on here but possibly it should be of some use to fellow newbies. Especially the pitfalls encountered along the way. I'm blogging it too so I may rapidly run out of time to do both updates, bear with me.

The beer: Brewer's Pride taken from page 111 of John Parke's, Home Brewing Self Sufficiency. I also have GW's superb book and my next recipe will be one of his but this is the first book I got and I'd decided on Brewer's Pride before buying Graham's book.

I'll be adding to this post through the day, or at least I'll try! I'll give all the weights and water volumes etc at the end of the post.



Mash liquor was going into my mash tun at 72C but the grist cooled it more than I expected and it was down to 62C even with an additional 1/2 kettle of boiling water by the time the lid went on. All covered up now and resting.

I pre-warmed the mash tun with hot water too! When I tested the mash tun just with hot water the other day it held its temp very well even without additional insulation which I'm using today (a sleeping bag and large blanket.).

Next time I'll warm the liquor to 80, bearing in mind this is a half size brew due to my stock pot turning out to hold 10 litres less than it is stamped as holding FFFUUUUU!

Well the mash went not too bad I think, final temp in the mash tun was 58C though so I'm a bit worried about that. Not sure what minimum is, all my books etc say keep it around 65C...

Could everything have gone wrong already? During the mash time I weighed out my hops, had a clean round and sterilized my fermentation bin, hydrometer etc

My sparging device is working well, nice slow, gentle trickle over the mash surface.

I think I'll come back and add photos to these posts as edits, it's all a bit fraught right now LOL

Sparging liquor temp is 75C and I have about 3 litres left to go...

See you soon. It's quite nerve wracking this 'ere brewing lark!

The sparging lasted just under 30 minutes before becoming a steady drip out of the tun into the collection bucket.

The wort is back in the boiler just coming up to the rolling boil. I think I'll put the pics in these posts after it's all over.

I've got my mush tun tipped forward slightly and there's still some residual wort dripping out so I'll keep collecting it to add to the boil. Smells great, tastes like some kind of tea with a subtle sweetness... does this sound about right?

The mash temp does matter, but as long it had a good bit of time between 62-70 it should be ok. You can tell if it is ok, the wort should be sweet and taste a bit like ovaltine.

It may be that your total efficiency will suffer.

Did you wrap the mash tun in blankets?

Yes I did wrap the mash tun with a sleeping bag and then a blanket as well as some polystyrene sheet under the base and on the lid.

Wort was subtley sweet, not sugary but sweet for me, don't know about ovaltine, never had it but the flavour was kind of a malty tea taste... no idea how to explain it really.

Just turned off the boiler, ready for aroma hops!

Kitchen smells wonderful

Why not take a gravity reading to see where your at?

Well done Steve! You have to keep those temps up in the mash, the size of the mash will mean it loses heat much quicker.

Good luck with the rest of it.

simple one wrote:Why not take a gravity reading to see where your at?

The temp is still too high to use any of the conversion tables I've got.

@Prolix - cheers!

Run a bit off on to a kitchen plate. Put it next to the window. It'll drop to a better temp quickly. Pour in to a jug and then jug in to the sample tube.

20 minutes from adding the aroma hops, there appears to be what looks like a very slight oily looking film. Is this usual? I'm thinking it might be the essential oils coming from the hops. it appears to be coming from the floating hop debris...

Too late to worry anyhow

stevetk189 wrote:20 minutes from adding the aroma hops, there appears to be what looks like a very slight oily looking film. Is this usual? I'm thinking it might be the essential oils coming from the hops. it appears to be coming from the floating hop debris...

Yep that will be the hop oil some hops have more than others and as Prolix says its tooo late now old son
Well done on your first it just gets better from here on in get the mash tun sorted and your efficiency will improve
Paul

SG 1040 @ 26C

I've got a bit frazzled during the last 20 minutes and this last half hour has been less than pleasant

Only ended up with about 9l of hopped wort, I'm meant to be brewing 12.5 litres... top up with water? weaker brew? Meh!

Oh well the first part went better than planned but I think it was pretty much f***ed by my mash temp to begin with. We'll see if it ferments and what I end up with before I get too gloomy.

It'll be great. It's very hard to make a bad all grain brew.

simple one wrote:It'll be great. It's very hard to make a bad all grain brew.

I hope so

[EDIT] I make the final gravity now it's cooled a bit to be 1023.7 (it's 1022 at 28C) without having a look around I don't know if that's any good or not. My book says 1040

Lessons learned:

• Small brew sizes are a pain in the a$$ - even with digi scales some things are to tiny to measure out accurately

• Temperature monitoring is aukward with a hand held thermometer - definitely adding a dial into my HLT and new copper

• Juggling temps at the final stages before pitching is quite difficult to a newbie

• Evaporation losses during the boil are considerable - approx 25% in this case

Some of the loss of final hopped wort was due to my drain in my copper stopping before fully emptied. I tested several times with water and it emptied fully, this time - no doubt due to the crud and hops it stopped with about 3/4 litre of wort left.

Reason for small brew size is mentioned in another post re my stock pot being 10l less than stamped.

The temp is still just over 30C - so I'm hanging fire adding the yeast just yet. I re-hydrated a dry yeast - I stopped my wort chiller at 32C because I thought that by the time i'd faffed about draining it and agitating it to aerate it, the temp would have dropped further. It didn't.

All in all I'm happy with the way the gear I've built works, not happy with the initial mash temp and I've made a note to heat the liquor a few degrees higher next time to allow for the cooling action of the grist as the hot liquor is added. Delighted with my wort chiller, it dropped the temp from 67 (I was following the instructions to stop boil, add aroma hops, wait 20, stir and wait another 20 in which time the hopped wort dropped to 67C) to 32C in about 10 minutes, didn't even fill my mash tun that I was using to collect the waste water.

Now I've got a bunch of photos to sort through, re-size and post. Maybe a coffee first... what am I saying!!!? Coffee! ... EFF THAT! Beer ON!!!