BFS Stout: A disaster of a brew day.
Posted: Mon Nov 26, 2018 12:33 pm
Just when you think you know what you're doing, a brew day comes along that slaps you in the chops and you reminds you that you know nothing.
Recipe for an Imperial(ish) Stout
5kg Pale Malt
200g Carafa 3
500g Dark Crystal
500g Caramunich
500g Wheat malt
500g Flaked oats
250g Chocolate malt
Hops... Well I'll get to that bit...
First up, the mash. Finally getting used to my not-so-new-anymore shiny mash tun and manage to just about hit my target mash temp of 66.7. Close enough anyway. It's an overnight mash, which I find simplifies my brew day and I actually seem to get slightly better efficiency out of it. The chocolate malt goes in at sparge time to get the colour but not so much of the bitter flavour.
Mash goes well, sparge goes well - I get all the wort I need plus a bit more in case the boil off is severe. All into the boiler and off we go.
While that comes to the boil I go off the garage to recover the hops from storage. I know I've got a couple of unopened bags out there. One is Warrior, the other Northern Brewer. Ah, but the labels have fallen off both of them, so I have no idea which is which. And the warrior are double the AA% of the NB. Balls. In the end I realised if I added equal amounts of both, and averaged the AA% I'd be okay.
My hops are going in after 40 minutes -it's not a particularly bitter beer, and I prefer the results from later hopping. It's literally seconds before I'm due to add them and the boiler cuts out completely. The plug terminals are actually hot, so I'm assuming that it's shorted out. I considered decanting it all, trying to fix the boiler and then starting again. But instead I thought 'oh bugger it' and chucked all the hops in - all the hops from both bags.
Now my problem is that my cooling coil hadn't gone in yet, so that's not sterile. It's a cold day so I decide the best thing is to get it into the FV and dump that outside to cool down. If you've ever wondered just how incredibly effective those copper coils are, this is one way to find out. The temperate of the wort creeps down. After 6h outside it's still at 35 degrees! So I shove it into the fridge and leave it to stabilise at 19 degrees.
Following morning I pitched the yeast and it's finally bubbling away.
I have no idea what this is going to turn out like. No cold break, short boil, no bittering hops (other than the effect of steeping a large quantity of hops for a fairly long time)... It'll either be terrible or superb but entirely unrepeatable.
So in the end:
100g Warrior
100g Northern Brewer
steeped at flameout/breakdown for about an hour.
WLP004 yeast.
23L at 1072. Chucked at least a litre away that I was saving to top up the boil as it progressed.
BFS Stout. You can probably work out what the B, F and S stand for
Recipe for an Imperial(ish) Stout
5kg Pale Malt
200g Carafa 3
500g Dark Crystal
500g Caramunich
500g Wheat malt
500g Flaked oats
250g Chocolate malt
Hops... Well I'll get to that bit...
First up, the mash. Finally getting used to my not-so-new-anymore shiny mash tun and manage to just about hit my target mash temp of 66.7. Close enough anyway. It's an overnight mash, which I find simplifies my brew day and I actually seem to get slightly better efficiency out of it. The chocolate malt goes in at sparge time to get the colour but not so much of the bitter flavour.
Mash goes well, sparge goes well - I get all the wort I need plus a bit more in case the boil off is severe. All into the boiler and off we go.
While that comes to the boil I go off the garage to recover the hops from storage. I know I've got a couple of unopened bags out there. One is Warrior, the other Northern Brewer. Ah, but the labels have fallen off both of them, so I have no idea which is which. And the warrior are double the AA% of the NB. Balls. In the end I realised if I added equal amounts of both, and averaged the AA% I'd be okay.
My hops are going in after 40 minutes -it's not a particularly bitter beer, and I prefer the results from later hopping. It's literally seconds before I'm due to add them and the boiler cuts out completely. The plug terminals are actually hot, so I'm assuming that it's shorted out. I considered decanting it all, trying to fix the boiler and then starting again. But instead I thought 'oh bugger it' and chucked all the hops in - all the hops from both bags.
Now my problem is that my cooling coil hadn't gone in yet, so that's not sterile. It's a cold day so I decide the best thing is to get it into the FV and dump that outside to cool down. If you've ever wondered just how incredibly effective those copper coils are, this is one way to find out. The temperate of the wort creeps down. After 6h outside it's still at 35 degrees! So I shove it into the fridge and leave it to stabilise at 19 degrees.
Following morning I pitched the yeast and it's finally bubbling away.
I have no idea what this is going to turn out like. No cold break, short boil, no bittering hops (other than the effect of steeping a large quantity of hops for a fairly long time)... It'll either be terrible or superb but entirely unrepeatable.
So in the end:
100g Warrior
100g Northern Brewer
steeped at flameout/breakdown for about an hour.
WLP004 yeast.
23L at 1072. Chucked at least a litre away that I was saving to top up the boil as it progressed.
BFS Stout. You can probably work out what the B, F and S stand for
I can think of both results in the past, hope you are lucky, but then again...... 