AG#4 - J. W. Lees Bitter

[JackA]

I decided to brew Graham's recipe for this beer - mainly pale malt with a small percentage of chocolate and hopped using fuggles. Chose the recipe as it was the only one I had all the ingredients for and I thought the touch of chocolate malt in a bitter could be interesting. Has anyone tried this recipe before? Anyone have any thoughts? I've never tried to the real thing so I wont have anything to compare it to...

This is my first time treating the water - I measured the alkalinity as 220 ppm using the salifert kit, so I thought I'd reduce down to ~25 ppm. What a bloody palaver! I put the numbers in Graham's water calc and added the corresponding amount of CRS to my liquor. I tested the alkalinity again and it seems I added far too much CRS! I worked out how much extra water tap I needed, poured out the right amount of (now acidic) liquor, added some more tap water and got around 25ppm. I've just looked up the numbers on the brupaks website and the calculation from Graham's calc was spot on (I wasn't concerned about the accuracy of the calculator, I was worried that the CRS I'd bought was a different concentration or something). I'm still trying to think what actually went wrong.... I needed to remove and replace 8 litres of water from 36, so that seems like quite a big error! I must have made a dosy mistake somewhere along the way I'll have to experiment with treating some smaller quantities of water and perfecting the technique.

Anyway, it's now mashed in at about 67 degrees with a little bit of gypsum. I checked the pH and it was somewhere around 5.2 or 5.3... everything seems to be back on track! I'm really hoping this will be a good one now I'm treating the water properly

[escapizm]

Im on AG#004 soon an thus far have used asda still water alone, ive just read i should add a teaspoon of gypmsum to help if i contunue down that route.

Water treatment scares me a little, ive just spoke with John of H&G and all he does is add a little burton salts (epsom and gypsum mix). Think ill try next AG which is a TTL with tap water with camden tablet and gypsum only. If its ok i may stick with that for the time being.

[Dennis King]

I made this one several weeks back not a bad pint. Tried the real thing in wales a few weeks earlier, very close

[JackA]

Im on AG#004 soon an thus far have used asda still water alone, ive just read i should add a teaspoon of gypmsum to help if i contunue down that route.

Water treatment scares me a little, ive just spoke with John of H&G and all he does is add a little burton salts (epsom and gypsum mix). Think ill try next AG which is a TTL with tap water with camden tablet and gypsum only. If its ok i may stick with that for the time being.

I did two brews of the same recipe, one with ASDA water (no additions) and one with tap water. They were both very different! It surprised me so much I decided I needed to investigate this water treatment lark. Graham's 'Brew your own real British ale' gives some good advice for easy treatment - basically boiling your liquor for half an hour before use then adding gypsum, but this adds quite a bit of time to your brew day, so I thought I'd try CRS. I was really starting to regret it an hour or so ago when it all went wrong!

Anyway, better start sparging

[JackA]

Collected 24 litres at about 1036 OG. Pretty pleased - my efficiency has gone from around 70% to 78% as a result of water treatment. Currently supping AG2, hopefully this will turn out even better!

[yashicamat]

Im on AG#004 soon an thus far have used asda still water alone, ive just read i should add a teaspoon of gypmsum to help if i contunue down that route.

Water treatment scares me a little, ive just spoke with John of H&G and all he does is add a little burton salts (epsom and gypsum mix). Think ill try next AG which is a TTL with tap water with camden tablet and gypsum only. If its ok i may stick with that for the time being.

It really isn't as scary as you might think. Do a bit of reading up, ring the water board and establish a total alkalinity figure for your area, then adjust using CRS to your target. Rather than add specific chemicals after then, I just use daab's method of a tsp of gypsum in the mash and same again in the boil. Seems to work for me.