Home Brew Forum

Exams, an 18 month old son, and buying a home means that I hadn't actually brewed anythign since April 13th! To keep things easy I decided to brew a very simple beer, a single hop, two malt beer:

5kg Pale Malt
1kg Dark Munich (20L)
Mashed at 66C for 75 mins with 2g of Gypsum and 2g of Calcium Chloride (very soft water here in Birmingham).

15g El Dorado at 30mins
85g El Dorado for 15mins Whirlpool addition.
49.5 IBU calculated

WLP051 - California Ale Yeast V (Anchor Liberty strain)

Collected 19L at 1.060 so liqoured back to 20.5L at 1.056. Hopefully it will stop at about 1.014 giving me about 5.6% ABV (the same as Sierra Nevada Pale Ale incidently)

Going to dry hop with 50g of El Dorado once fermentation slows - it's currently in the brew fridge at 19.5 degrees C.

Good Points:
Wort was far clearer than usual, think this was because I actually waited for a good proper hot break and had a strong rolling boil on this one. This was evident by the amount of trub in the bottom of the boiler, which seemed more congealed than usual. And possibly partly due to recirculating using a sieve to filter a small amount of grains out.

Bad Points:
I need new plastic hose for the kettle - mine have discoloured badly now and dispite an unhealthy addiction to sanitisation, I don't like the look of them.
Secondly, not being able to make a starter - see business at start of the thread for an explanation.
Thirdly, this is the last brew in my current house. After months of saving a deposit we have finally brought our first property and will be moving in on 27th August. This will probably mean I need to make some adjustments to my brewing practices for the new home. E.g. I cant remember if there is an outside tap for my wort chiller or if I'll need to purchase some other type of hose lock!

Good luck with the move.

As for wort chiller- you can get a Hozelock thing that screws into the kitchen tap,assuming it has one of those grids on the end of it. Sorrry,I don't know the technical term)

Cheers!

Yes I have seen something similar - just need to check out the condition of the taps etc and find out what I need to get. It's crucial when viewing a new house to think about how you are going to brew in it. I get shared use of a utility room, to store all my kit in the new home! Woo!

I checked the progress yesterday on this one. Still has a little krausen ontop but the OG was still 1.022 which isn't ideal. The sample still seemed to have a lot of yeast in suspension though so maybe WLP0051 doesn't produce so big a krausen before floccing out? I gave the bucket a good shake anyway and decided to dry hop now with 100g of leaf hops.

The taste didn't blow me away but it's still early days - didn't seem very bitter at all more like how a Cask Ale would taste - but this was more a trial based from my experiences with my last beer (IPA) where Citra and Topaz were a little harsh with 8g addition of both at FWH. I wanted to see what 30 min hopping would do.

Will check on it again midweek - with the aim of crash cooling for 24-48 hours before transfering to the keg on Sunday.

Checked this last night - down to 1.015 now which is about 5.38% ABV and 71% attentuation which is about right for this yeast.

Going to start cold crashing it tomorrow with the aim of kegging on Sunday.

It tastes nice, a pretty standard APA - the bitterness is a little low and this proves my experiment with 30min bittering hops, I would definitely use this technique for an IPA, but will either stick with FWH additions of larger bittering charges at 30 min in the future. I think the bitterness issue here is compounded further by the fact that El Dorado are quite low Cohumulene content and so are not as harsh as something like Citra!

A simple beer - but the sum is more than the parts!