Bought the Woolly Jumper kit off the Barleybottom website.
Ingredients
4kg Maris Otter
200g Crystal Malt 120l
150g Torrified Wheat
10g Roast Barley
42g East Kent Goldings 90min boil
12g East Kent Goldings 15min boil
25g Bobek 1min
1 Protofloc tablet @ 20mins
S-04 yeast
Heated liquor to 72c, treated with 1/2 campden tablet, and mashed in with 12l liquor. Temp settled to 67c and left to continue. Checked the temp at half time - 66c and then after 90mins - 65c. Homemade mash tun appeared to be working well up to now.
Gave it a good stir whilst adding 3l of liquor. Took off 4l and allowed that to trickle back onto the top of the mash. Runnings were surprisingly clear. I matched the output as best as I could by 'jugging' liquor over the mash - temp 80c. As soon as there was an inch of wort in the boiler I turned it on. I continued to collect until I had 6 gallons in the boiler with no stuck runnings. At this volume, the wort had an sg of 1041 @ 20c. Hops were added to the above schedule, as was the protofloc tablet. Homemade IC added half an hour before the end of the boil, and the water turned on once the boil had completed.
Final sg was 1050 @ 20c, slightly higher than the suggested sg in the instructions - 1045.
Had what appeared to be a good cold break, certainly like I have seen in some of the pictures on this site.
Transfer into the FV went without a hitch, again with no stuck runnings. The wort was a lovely deep amber in colour, sweet to taste but with a mellow bitterness I've never had in my kit beer experiences.
I hydrated the yeast with cooled boiled water 2 hours before pitching, adding just a pinch of sugar to give it a bit of life. Already, 5hrs after pitching there is the beginnings of a head.
Here's hoping that it will continue as well as today has gone
I can't wait to try it and can't wait to make another. Thanks to all on this site that answered my sometimes daft questions and gave me great advice.
I did try to take some pictures of various stages using my phone, now all I need to do is work out how to get them onto this site. If I upload them to Flicr, will they be postable here? Or can I do it from facebook, I'm going to send them there from my phone. I even took a small ten second video of the hops rolling around in the boil,
but I was excited lol.Anyway, cheers all
Andrew
Edited to try and add some of the pictures, already been told they are boring pics so I hope you all don't mind...lol
