Sussex Best Clone - 3rd Grain Brew, 1st after 16yrs

[Jed]

Hello, a quick bit of background. I’ve only done 2 all grain brews before, these were 16 years ago using a homemade ‘cool box’ Mash tun and a reconditioned Burco boiler. The 1st was a Pale Ale, using recovered yeast from Summer Lightning bottles, this was good but did have a kind of Summer Lightning taste to it. The 2nd was a Porter, which I tried to condition in a plastic barrel, this didn’t go well, I had to ditch it.
So, skip 16 years to now. A friend asked if I still had the equipment to brew all grain as he’d like to give it a go, yes and so we did.

Brew number 3… Sussex Best clone from the Malt Miller…
We decided a tried and tested recipe was a good place to start. We also decided to attempt BIAB for ease of process and equipment used.

Ingredients.
3500g Extra Pale Maris Otter
272g Crystal 240 Dark Malt
204g Flaked Torrefied Maize
500g Oat Husks
26g Progress Pellets (at 60mins)
26g Bramling Cross Pellets (at 30mins)
15g Fuggles Pellets (Flame out to cool)
15g Golding Pellets (Flame out to cool)
Brewlab Yeast Slope – Sussex Ale Yeast
Targets
OG 1040, FG 1008, ABV 4%
Boil 90mins

Pre Brewday
01/05/24 – 4 days before Brewday. Made a yeast starter using the Brewlab yeast. 33mg DME, 300ml water. No stir plate, just swirling every so often. After 9 hours not much sign of propagation. 12 hours later it was working, but not as well as I had imagined.
03/05/24 – The day before Brewday. Cleaned everything. Prepared approx 8gallons of tap water with Campden tablet.

Brewday 04/05/24
Mash.
Using the Burco boiler as the Mash Tun, we got the liquor, 25ltrs, to strike heat of 74 C, hoping to mash at 66 C for 60mins. Used a thermal liner from a coat as insulation. We used a traditional type of thermometer, although we thought our temps were correct, initially 67 C, a reading 50mins later was 68 C. So, we may have Mashed at a highish temperature. The Mash also exceeded its time by about 20mins. We lifted the grain bag out and rested it on a grill above the boiler. Using hot liquor from a kettle we rinsed the grains.

Boil.
Our timings were a bit out during the boil too. It was longer than 90mins, more like 110mins. We used a Hop Spider to contain the hops. Our initial Hops went in 30min too early! The rest would have been on target if we’d stuck to the 90mins… 15mins before the end I added 5g of Protofloc granules, on reflection I think this may have been too much…
To cool the Wort, I used my homemade copper cooling coil. Some 16-year-old cooling water shot out of both ends on insertion, I was aware this might happen so not a problem. It took 30min+ to cool.

Fermentation.
The OG was on Target at 1040. I pitched the whole yeast starter and placed the Fermentation bucket in the understairs cupboard which has a steady temperature of 19 to 20 C.
Over the next 4 days fermentation seemed slow, no massive krausen but still complete coverage, there seemed to be yeast on the bucket walls. I took a SG reading, 1014. So, it had completed 80% of fermentation to its target and there was plenty of activity in the sample.
Took another sample and reading after another 4 days, 1012. Not much sign of activity and beer starting to clear. Tasted great.
Took 2 more readings over the next 7days, they were both about 1012. So, decided to bottle.

Bottling.
We primed each bottle with 2.5g of brewers sugar. Using a bottling stick we bottled 40 x 500ml bottles.
This was almost 2 weeks ago. The bottles are still in warm storage and clearing well, soon to be moved to cool storage.

Conclusion.
Obviously, there’s a few lessons to be learned with more accurate temperature readings, timings and Protofloc dosage etc.
I’m guessing why we didn’t hit our FG target of 1008 may have been down to too hot a Mash and/or underperforming yeast? What do you think?
ABV is down a little too, calculated to about 3.8%.
However, we thoroughly enjoyed this Brewday and I reckon the beer will be ok considering how good the samples tasted along the way. Whether it tastes like Sussex Best or not is a different matter. I’ll open one in a couple of weeks and post an update.

Cheers everyone.

I have some pics from the day... how do I upload them? guess the answer to this is somewhere on here, I'll have a look.

[Brewedout]

Nice post! I'm assuming that you have had time to drink it now?

I'd say that the higher mash temperature prevented you from achieving your target of 1008, as you'd have unfermentable sugars from this that would keep your FG higher. It will probably give your beer a bit more residual sweetness and body. I wouldn't think it would be a problem with the yeast. Brewlabs yeast has always been excellent, and as long as you followed their instructions would be fine.

[Grainherder]

Wow, congratulations! Thank you for such thorough notes and I'd love to see photos, and your impressions on how it all turns out.

[IPA]

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