Galaxian Pale Ale 3/12/08

[adm]

Today's brew was a single hop brew using the little known Galaxy hop.

Here's the recipe I ended up with:

Fermentables
5kg Maris Otter
0.5Kg Crystal (fairly dark crystal actually)
0.25Kg Wheat Malt
Target 23l. OG 1051

Hops
12g Galaxy Pellets First Wort 15% AA, 20 IBU
24g Galaxy Pellets 15m 15% AA, 19 IBU
20g Galaxy Pellets Flame Out (or steeped at 80C) 15% AA, 0 IBU
Total 39 IBU

Safale US05 Yeast
Water treatment - Dry Pale Ale setting from Graham's water calculator

This brew had a few quirks.....

Firstly, one of the elements on my HLT decided not to play ball and tripped the ring every time I tried to turn it on, so I ended up bringing 50L to strike temp on a single element which took 2.5 hours. Lesson learned - either fix it, or set the HLT on a timer so it's ready when I get up. I have timers, don't know why I didn't use one.
Ended up getting to temp at around 1100.

So, on with the brew. This is the first time I have used pellets and i have heard how fine the trub is and how easy it blocks hop strainers. Not having the foresight to go out yesterday and buy some fine mesh frying pan guards to adapt my H&G hop strainer, I thought I'd risk it by tying a muslin bag around it. Good idea, right ?

Here's the strainer plus muslin in the boiler ready to go.


I treated the HLT water with CRS and a Camden tablet last night. Here's the additional dry liquor salts for the boil. My rinky dink baby scales from Hong Kong arrived yesterday. £3.99 with a resolution of 1/100 of a gramme. Certainly takes the guesswork out of measuring these out.


Here's the grist. MO, Crystal and Wheat Malts


Here's the first wort hops - nicely vac packed and arrived from Australia in 7 days. 15% AA !!


And here's the pellets themselves. I was amazed how small these are - and how strong they smelt. Lovely, if not quite as emotionally satisfying as whole flower hops. I was really tempted to up the hop amounts as 12g of these just didn't look enough compared to chucking in big handfuls of whole hops.


Mash in. Here's where the fun starts though......
I thought I had calculated the strike temperature well today...I aimed for a 66C mash temp, thoroughly preheated my mash tun so there was no thermal mass to take into account and worked out that 75C would be the ideal strike temp given my cold grain. I heated the water in the HLT to 80C, ran my first liquor into the tun and was going to wait for it to drop to 75 then mash in. However - as soon as the water was in the tun, the thermometer read 74C, which was suspicious as it only took about 20 secs for it all to go from the HLT to the mashtun.....Hmmmmm.....

I mashed in anyway and got a thermometer reading of 64.6C. What's going on here? It seems too cold given the HLT temp. I cracked out a brand new emergency Ikea thermo I keep as a spare and tried that. 68C - much more like it. Checked it with a spirit thermo and it said the same thing. Going by democratic principles, it's my Hanna thermo that's reading wrong - and about 4C out at mash tem, which is no use at all.


Ok - so the Hanna is definitely going in for calibration tomorrow.

Anyway - with that sorted, I carried on.....


No more problems with the mash, nice easy sparge and the wort is up to the boil before the sparge is even quite done. I love the Bullfinch burner!


Preboil gravity 1043. Perfect!


Ooops - forgot this one. Mash pH at more or less a perfect 5.2

No more pics for a bit. After a perfect boil and a quick cool to 25C due to the lovely cold weather and water, I started running off to the FV. Very slow trickle. Oh well.....I thought I'd leave it for a while. No rush after all. 30 minutes later, I had collected less than a litre. Bugger. I blew some CO2 up the boiler tap, but it kept just slowing to a trickle and stopping entirely after a couple of seconds. Tried stirring it. Same thing.

Damn. It's the pellet trub from hell. So I sanitised my arm and guddled around to remove the muslin bag. Still had the same problem. At this point, I thought bugger it and just removed the hop strainer entirely, gave the wort a good stir to try and whirlpool it to build the trub cone in the middle, let it settle for a while and ran it off, resigned to the worst....

So it ran off beautifully - not really surprising with no filter. However - when I got to my 23l mark, I still had quite a lot of wort in the kettle and the liquid had only just about reached the trub level. Of course, I'd left my normal 3l boiler deadspace and hop absorbtion factor in the water calculation, but the pellet hops hardly absorb any water. Doh!

So I got my 23L as planned, and left the rest to cut my losses and not suck out too much trub. I could have probably got another 2.5L out of it, but it would have meant taking most of the pellet trub, and as it was i managed to leave most of it in the kettle. I didn't see any evidence of a trub cone from the whirlpool though....it was all pretty much evenly spread out across the bottom.


Here's the final wort. 23L at 1053. Pretty clear as well - sespacially given the fannying about with the hop strainer. Not bad at all.

So, trials and tribulations, but the brew ended up in the FV and pitched with US05 and a bit of Brupaks yeast nutrient. It's just begun to bubble after about 4 hours, so we're off and running.

The pellet trub fiasco has given me an idea for a simple, small and easy strainer that involves an elbow connector, a pipe screen and not much else. Should work, but I won't get a chance to test it until I brew with pellets again.

Also - I hope I'll get away with putting my sanitised hand in the wort. I'd been washing stuff up in hot water and brucleans for a while before, so my skin was probably pretty damn clean. Hopefully clean enough. We'll see....

Live and learn, eh?

[delboy]

yeah those h&g strainers (blockers ) struggle with whole hops never mind pellets, lose the outer parts of the strainer but keep the pipe leading to the tap, put an elbow pointing downwards on it and encase the whole lot in stainless mesh/or splatter guards it'll work like a dream, dead space will be greatly reduced (use the syphon effect) and it'll laugh in the face of whole hops

BTW i hope that the batch works out ok.

[mysterio]

Great pics, loving the sound of the Galaxy hops.

Yeah, the I have the same strainer and it was a PITA until I modified it. Used to give me grief every second brewday.

[adm]

I've got (potentially) an even simpler solution!

Ladies and Gentlemen of the Jury, I give you the "Trub Buster". Maybe.

Lose the entire strainer, take one compression elbow and fit a pipe screen (small circular piece of mesh) into the compression nut itself, then fit that directly to the 1/2 inch thread in my boiler so that the screen is pointing down. By my reckoning, this will sit about 3mm off the floor of the boiler. If it's too low or too high, I will add a piece of bent copper pipe between the thread and the horizontal arm of the elbow so I can position it exactly right. Nice siphon action too.

My reasoning is that it shouldn't clog too easily as gravity will prevent trub clogging the screen, and it's protected from anything landing on top of it by the elbow itself.

The version below is engineering protoype #1. I'll find a clean screen before my field test.

[adm]

Completely OT, but I just noticed I'm over 1000 posts now.....doesn't time fly....

[SiHoltye]

It'd be great if that worked, the surface area looks very small for passing gravity driven trubby wort though. Like I said, it'd be great if it works, I'll keep watching.

[delboy]

very small surface area on that thing adm, but i suppose its a suck it and see situation. My own bodge actually incorparates the use of a bent up stainless steel racking cane (it was as much use as a chocolate fireguard) to lift the mesh/splatter guard up from the elbow. The run off is like a stallion taking a piss

PS belated congrats on hitting the 1000 mark

[adm]

Yeah.....my main worry is the small area too.

My plan was to set this up so that it's right at the side of the kettle, then try and get a really good whirlpool action going so that most of the trub ends up in a cone in the middle of the kettle and the outside is relatively clear. I still haven't managed to get a decent whirlpool that actually leaves a trub cone though....

The downside is that I'm going to have to do a test run sometime soon.....dammit - that'll mean more beer has to be brewed and my FVs are full!

[adm]

This beer is now down to 1013 and appears to have finished primary fermentation. I'll move it to the cold garage to drop out over the weekend, although it seems fairly clear already and there is a thick and solid yeast and trub layer of about an inch in the bottom of the FV

The hydro sample smells and tastes great. There's a definite passionfruit aroma and taste to it and I think it's going to be a cracker.

My wife (without any prompting) said it smelt of passionfruit with a little hint of honey and the taste was citrus and passionfruit.

No hint of any off flavours or smells, so it seems I got away with guddling about in the boiler with a sanitised hand!

[adm]

This beer has come out really nice indeed! I was supping it last night and was very impressed with myself.

It's got a bit of a peach and elderflower nose with slight tropical fruit hints. Smooth bitterness with no astringency. Very classy aroma. good hop and malt balance too. All in all, a good solid single hop ale that puts the hop to the fore.

I've got it too highly carbonated though - I've backed the gas pressure off and hopefully it will settle out a bit.

Ands it's star bright too. The last two I've done haven't come out quite clear and I was suspecting a chill haze problem (mind you, they hadn't been fined). I used a pack of BeerBrite on this one and it's dropped lovely and clear.

[edit1now]

Good one. Let us know how you get on with your elbow strainer thing please?

[BarnsleyBrewer]

Nice idea, but without putting a damper on it We use this type at work on the cooling system, the gauze soon gets bocked.