!st BIAB: Suggest a Recipe!

[Valley Commando]

OK so , I have a 40L Buffalo Boiler, a bag, 2x 25l fementors and a selection of ingredients.
25kg Maris otter pale malt (thankyou Simpsons maltsters!)
200g Goldings of dubious provenance (no AA% number!)
100g Fuggles (again dubious, no AA% known)
100g Pilgrim (proper good sh*t, 10.1% AA, vac packed 2010 harvest)
Safale S04 pack

I am looking to brew a 5gal/23 batch on something from this base set of ingredients, possibly a SMASH : can anyone help with a recipe for somethink drinkable, approx 4% ABV with what I have got? Not bothered for style: I usually drink Pils, but appreciate I dont have the ingredients or the temp control/lagering facility now to brew that! Something light and "lawnmowerish"!?

Thanks in advance!

[Bribie]

Single malt would be perfect for a lawnmower with those ingredients and would give you a nice lagerish colour to boot.

I'd go 4.5 kg Maris Otter

Mash at 65 degrees for an hour

Hop Bill:

25g Pilgrim boiled 60 mins
30g dodgy Goldings for the last 10 minutes

S-04 is ok but for a "fake" lager, US-05 will give a more neutral yeast character

Depending on what efficiency you get, ABV from 3.8 to 4.3 % would be in the ballpark

[Valley Commando]

Many thanks for the reply Bribie, I found the guides and stuff that you have put on AussieHomebrewer and BIABrewer very helpful, and helped me make my choice of the electric urn to BIAB in. I gotta say the 40L Buffalo is an excellent bit of kit, got quite a powerful boil and thermal control with the inbuilt thermostat is very easy. Highly recommended! I have rigged up a pulley, sewn my bag, all set to dough in once kids go to bed!

[Valley Commando]

Well, 4.5kg MO in the mash, at 66-67 ish degrees. Its hot work: ambient is 24C and the urn took next to no time to hit mash temp (filled with 60C water from my ridiculously hot hot water tap! Now sunk 3 pints of Celler Pils ( an excellent slightly fruity 4.9% brew from the local brauhaus, with convenient swingtops for homebrew) and getting pretty minging: No more drinking until all wort boiling is sorted. I will banish my little 4 year old helper from the cellar for the boil: too much hot wort for her to be playing at assistant brewer. All the sundry kit bits are in VWP sterilant at the moment, going to pop down and rinse off in a minute, and double check my pulley/colander combo for lifting and squeezing the bag works ok before the mashout.

[Valley Commando]

Just checked 45 mins into mash, temp in urn = 66.3C. Virtually no temp drop since start of mash thanks to a minimal amount of insulation.

[Valley Commando]

Taken load of pictures , will upload later. Mashout time delayed by the War Dept, dinner time!

[Valley Commando]

So 29 L into Boiler, 27L post mash vol, 24L post boil volume. Urn a little slow to make rolling boil, so boil time was 70 mins from hitting the on switch. Hop additions made as planned. Really pleased, house smells like SA Brains used to in Cardiff when I was a kid! Decanted about 23 L into FV. Ambient temp now 16 outside, 21 inside. Had yet another beer, and promptly forgot my Irish moss, but no big problem.

[jimp2003]

Get in there!!

Sounds like you had a pretty smooth brewday. Let us know how it turns out.

Cheers

Jim

[Valley Commando]

So its all chilling in the FV in a water/ice bath as we speak; wort temp is too high to pitch for a bit. It looks like I am a bit over gravity, now my sample has cooled down: 1.047 ish at room temp. So I am planning on topping up with water before pitching yeast. I figure if that attenuates normally I will end up at 5% ABV, hence a little water to bring me down to an easy drinking level (chills the wort and fills a few more bottles too!). No idea about efficiency level!
Wort has got some pretty strong bittering at present, though I think it will mellow out a bit when it gets going. Worked out IBUs are approx 47 for the recipe!!!!! Maybe next time I will reduce the bittering hops a bit, depending on how this turns out.

Cleanup is all done: the Buffalo concealed element is great, very easy to clean (just a little crud burned to the central "hotspot"). Hops and boiler trub dumped, bag in the washing machine. I even found time to sit down and watch a film with the wife whilst brewing. Aint BIAB great!
Sh*t meself when I heard the airlock vodka bubbling before realising that it was bubbling inwards due to the cooling air and wort inside the FV. Reckon I will be good to pitch in about hour or so!

[Valley Commando]

So I just pitched my yeast: Straight in dry, no rehydrate. Now going to aerate, then place back in the water bath with a slow flow of tap water to maintain it at 18-19C. Pretty certain this one will blow off a bit, asthe FV now looks rather overfull with 26L final volume following dilution.

[Bribie]

VC, how easy was that, hey

Please report on the eventual beer

[Valley Commando]

It's bubbling away nicely in the FV now.
Bribie, it really couldnt have been easier. Minimal time, minimal equipment! 40L Buffalo is perfect for a 25L batch, it really is, as billed, "a complete turnkey brewery" for 140 quid plus some swiss voile and any old insulation you have lying around.

VCs Top tips for BIAB Based on this brew:
I found handy to have some bungy cords available ; bungy cord your insulation on. Bungy your FV to the correct position under your tap so you dont knock it away from the flow of wort.
Electric urn beats gas hands down for convenience, safety , and (in my case anyway), price. Your urn is not drawing power a lot of the time due to the thermostat and insulation.
Tap can be wired open or closed with garden wire.
A pail is handy to dump your hop socks and bag in.
Pulley is probably unnecessary for a normal strength man as 4.5 kg of grain plus wort is easily sub 10 kg all up.
Invest instead in a large colander that fits over the urn.
Hot wort is hot! Gloves/saucepan lids stop hands burning when you squeeze the bag.
The brewing smell will percolate the apartment, so warn SWMBO in advance.
Aeration is easy with a cordless drill and a burger flipper.
A plugged deep sink with a slowly running tap and clear overflow makes a great impromptu FV chiller, and is a lot cheaper than copper. Hell you probably have one in your kitchen already. So it takes longer that a CF chiller? So what, just seal it up in the sink, do something with the family and come back in a couple of hours.
26L is a good handy size to lift about. I can see how bigger brewlengths = far more inconvenient, as the ability to hoik the full FV around the brewery is handy.

[Valley Commando]

So its been two weeks, The airlock stopped bubbling after 4 days. Opened the lid, great smell. Took a sample, gravity 1.008ish, sample flat, very cloudy, but tastes really good: a fruity, light flavour not too strong, that really took me back to days drinking in the Hope and Anchor pub in Bristol as a student, really reminded me of a great beer I used to drink there: possibly Gem from Bath Ales? With a bit of fizz added this brew will be good drinking.

I reckon the fermentation had finished, so boiled a a little water in the clean Buffalo urn to sterilize it, and ran some boiling water off the urn tap. VWP run through my hosing and rinsed. Then added 120g of table sugar to 1L boiling water in urn, and racked off 24L of beer into the urn to act as a bottling bucket, leaving a little beer over the yeast slurry at the bottom of the FV. I had planned to rack to secondary and leave to chill and settle a few days, but as my secondary FV has yet to be fitted with a tap for bottling the urn was the obvious choice. VWP sterilized and rinsed 40 swing top 500ml bottles, plus a few PET lemonade bottles. Set urn up on workbench, and rigged a narrow nozzle (modified, sterile, biro pen case) onto the tap using duct tape! Original urn tap tends to be too wide for easy bottling. While not ideal from the infection point of view, it was the best I had available and worked great, so fingers crossed.
Then it was a production line of filling bottles. They are now goinfg to sit for a few days in the warm cellar before transfer to the cold garage to condition for 3 weeks. Autumn is coming and ambient temp is now down to 8C at night and 16C during day: garage stays pretty constantly cool and is a safe place for any bottle bombs to explode!
I cant see the haze clearing, but I really dont mind that as long as the beer carbs up well it should be a good one. I have a half full glass by my side now and it smells fabulous even after being leftout overnight: Supermarket beer goes rancid over that time, but this stuff is live and still good!

So now I offer a prayer to the Gods of carbonation: Just carb up nicely!

[Valley Commando]

Beer has now been in bottles for 1 week in the warm (heat wave struck Germany!): I couldn't resist having a try, so last night popped one in the fridge overnight. It has cleared up a lot, though still has some haze. There is a moderate amount of sediment dropped out at the bottom of the swingtop bottle. On opening, only moderate carbonation so far (primed with sugar at rate 5g/L, but that small bit of fizz has really elevated the mouthfeel to a "proper" beer and given a bit of carbonation bite which I like. Taste: some esters, really a nice, fruity summer ale flavour, absolutely drinkable, and really tasty. I was worried about the bittering level making it too bitter, but in fact the sweet/bitter balance maybe a little on the sweet malt side rather than bitter and in order to be perfect I would go with a little more hopping next time (completely opposite to what I expected!). Alcohol level tastes just right, importantly~ its not overstrong (which is a big turnoff for myself, I far prefer sub 5% and ideally sub 4.0% abv beers usually, just easier to drink! ).

Its still early days, but I think next time I brew I may add 5g of hops for both additions, I will prime with 7g/L to increase carbonation level a little. I am also keen to see what S05 can do vs S04. I saved and separated my yeast from the FV and have it ready to make a starter for the next brew, but I think I will chuck it in the freezer and get a sachet of S05 to try.

[Valley Commando]

Update: This recipe turned out really rather well: A nice, inoffensive easy drinking ale with good amber colour that is not too alcoholic. Pilgrim hops flavour dominates the Goldings, but that is no bad thing, as Pilgrim has an almost smoky flavour to my nose, which balances out the fruit/ester rich character of the S04 yeast. Finally clearing after 3+ weeks in bottle!

I liked it, why not try it yourself?