Home Brew Forum

Hi guys,

After brewing a couple of terrible beers, I have decided to go back to basics. I was hellbent on speeding up the brewday to save time and the beer quality has suffered as a result. So, for this clone, there will be no recirculation, no no-chill, no pumps, no manifolds - just plain old 3V gravity setup with 90 min mashes and boils.

There will actually be two new aspects - I did the mash for this brew on Friday night, and I've turned the boiler on this morning at 7:30am. The mash (with fly sparging) took 2.5hours - as I said, a 90 minute mash and a slow hour-long sparge to 30 litres in the boiler.

The recipe is for Black Sheep Best Bitter from Graham Wheeler's BYOBRA p124, using pale malt, torrefied wheat, crystal and black malt with challenger, fuggle and goldings.

Here's some photos:

3 tier in action
Untitled by Ben, on Flickr

Untitled by Ben, on Flickr

Untitled by Ben, on Flickr

First runnings
Untitled by Ben, on Flickr

Boiler ready for morning
Untitled by Ben, on Flickr

Cascade pale refreshment (one of my better beers recently)
Untitled by Ben, on Flickr

Morning wort
Untitled by Ben, on Flickr

brew day complete!

First runnings into fermenter
Untitled by Ben, on Flickr

Just under 23L (using Wilko's uncalibrated calibrations)
Untitled by Ben, on Flickr

Drained - no hop filter, chilled with immersion chiller then whirlpooled
Untitled by Ben, on Flickr

target gravity of 1.038 reached
Untitled by Ben, on Flickr

I think I need to get some Thermawrap insulation for my Bergland 50L pot - maybe that the winter temps didn't help, but my Buffalo 3kw induction cooker got the 30L up to boil ok, but then a fuse blew after about 45 minutes because I was running it on the limit at 3kw - didn't realise for about 10 minutes, ran it at 2.8kw for the rest of the "boil" but it struggled to get back up past 98 degrees.

Will pitch S-04 in a few hours and hopefully this will be kegged and ready for Christmas Day.

Ben