500g Caramünch
200g crystal malt
62g Melanoidin malt (end of packet)
Using HERMS system -
Mash schedule:
15 litres liquor
½ hour @ 50 ̊C protease/ peptidase rest
1 hour @ 65 - 66 ̊C beta amylase rest
heated to about 78 ̊C for sugar solubility before sparging with 78 ̊C water down to 2̊ Brix
NB mash liquor and sparge liquor each had 0.4g metabisulphite added (= 1 Campden tablet) to kill chloramine.
20.5 litres in boiler
Boiled 1 hour with 30g 2006 home-grown Hallertau hops and lidful of Irish Moss
Boiled 15 minutes with 84g 2006 home-grown Hallertau hops (end of bag)
Force-cooled to 22 ̊C
14 litres in brewing barrel (the hops drank most of that I think) EDIT: I forgot I stole 1.75 litres of wort to freeze for some yeast starters - 3 x 250 ML and 1 x 1l, so 21 litres at start of boil down to 15.75 litres which should have gone in the brewing bucket.
Pitched SO-4 starter made with wort, but it only had about 1 ½ hours to start up. It was going quite well though.
OG 12.6̊ Brix = 1051 or with hydrometer 1046 @ 22 ̊C = 1047.2 @ 15.5 ̊C
pics (apologies if these look rather like my last brewday:
Doughed-in: the liquor looks quite floury -
From time to time the grain bag would ping off its clips. Once I raised the temperature to 65̊C it got worse, and I worked-out that the pump was sucking the mash down onto the false bottom because not enough liquor was getting through the grains. I'd thought this problem would have gone away when I graduated to a March pump from my old fire-engine one. I resurrected the aluminium mesh tunnel from when I used to heat the mash tun directly:
and that worked as long as I stirred it all up from time to time:
It makes more sieving surface for the liquor to drain out of the mash and down to the bottom of the mash tun. I'm fantasizing about a sort of mega-colander for the future.
If you compare this 65̊C picture:
to the doughing-in picture above, you can see the mash has changed - it looks clearer, more like chicken stock than gravy.
Preheating the sparging tee:
The heat exchanger and pump now have drain valves so I can empty the hoses (into a shiny bucket I got for my birthday last year) with less risk of scalding myself:
Running-off:
Sparging:
Looks a bit thin now:
Now you can see the crinkly bottom, squashed by the pump sucking on the grain bag:
The floury stuff in the mash appears to have found its way to the bottom:
I tipped it onto the spent grains, to go on the compost heap:
Pumping the wort back up to the boiler:
The boil:
Late hops and chiller:
Cooling:
