Christmas brew for 2013. Ideas please.

[minesapint]

Hello Dave.
The kitchen seems the best place to ferment. Any unexpected frothing over just goes onto the worktop and is easily cleaned up.
Cant use the garage at this time of the year as it is a bit cold for fermenting. The tub wont fit on the normal worktops as there are low cupboards above them.
So in Winter I have a fermenting bin one end of the window, then the sink , then a full kingkeg.
I found that if I left the kingkeg full in the garage and we had frost, the gas vanished from the barrel.
Dont know if the gas goes into solution in the beer or escapes through the cold, hard rubber safety seal.
So when its cold the beer stays indoors. And the bottles mature under the stairs.
The fermenter has an old demi-john heater below it and a couple of plastic bin bags to to keep the warmth in. After the ferment the heater goes under the kingkeg for a few days to get the priming sugar in the barell doing its job.
The window is double glazed but it still gets cold on the window sill. Not as good as the old fashioned secondary double glazing we used to have.
Hope that answers your question Dave .
Cheers nice to hear from you.

[minesapint]

Twelfth Night at Toad Hall, finally bottled.

O.G. 1.088 Final Gravity 1.022.
Nearly 9% ABV. ( according to the sums)
40-something 275 ml bottles and 5 one pint bottles , racked and bulk primed with brewing sugar (at least that is what the label says it is) plus a little sediment carried over to make sure I have some yeast .
After bottling that lot and a batch of brown ale at the same time, I now remember why I started using Kingkegs.
What a chore it was.

In the past during cold weather the bottles have been very slow to ferment. This time I have stood all of the full bottles in warm water for about ten minutes to take the chill off them. The cold tap water is very cold in winter and I always rinse out the sodium met from my stored bottles before filling, hence the chilled bottles.
After a quick ten minute warm soak I dried them off and stood them in the living room.
After a week of room temperature they will go under the stairs into a cooler more stable environment for long term storage until next December.

Cheers to you all for your excellent ideas and thanks for the introduction to The Sensible Mole Website.

[mcdonald_ajr]

You're very welcome. I am a great admirer of the Mole! I sympathise with the hassles of bottling, but it is worth it. Try his Dark Lantern next. I have that in a cornelius keg, and it's nearly empty I must brew some more. Luckily it it doesn't take a year to mature.

Anthony

[minesapint]

Hello again to macdonald_ajr

Before I have a go at Dark Lantern I need to get some mild brewed pretty quickly.
As I mash and boil in the green house I am a bit out of routine ( and beer) due to the snow and cold weather.
My standby quick-brew is Jennings Dark Mild from Brew Your Own British Real Ale (BYOBRA).
I dont think it would win any major awards but I like it and it is drinkable after only ten days in a Kingkeg.
In cold weather such as now I put the fermenter on a seed tray warmer and once fermented and racked into the King keg, the heater goes under the Kingkeg for about five or so days to give the priming sugar a helping hand. Thats my quick brew standby.

Back to the Dark Lantern.
It has one heck of an ingredients bill. Almost 8.5 kilograms. This is another that I would have to make in reduced quantity due to the limits on my mashing set up. Bottles again I am afraid.
Any info on start and finish gravities would be most appreciated.

If Col Robinson is still looking in , a suggestion for you.
If you should one day be at a loose end and decide to tweek The Sensible Mole Site, how about putting start and finish gravities on the recipes.
I was glad mcdonald -ajr mentioned his final gravity for Twelfth Night . I would have normally had nightmares about bottling at 1.022 .

Many thanks mcdonald and Col

Cheers all

[mcdonald_ajr]

Here are my brewing notes.

9. 20th Nov 2012 - made my version of Dark Lantern from the Sensible Mole Brewery website. Used a fresh water filter. Recipe called for a stiffer mash, only 15 litres of water for a 21 litre recipe. Beer Engine suggested 17l, which would have given a very full mashtun. Ph was 5.2. Overnight mash started at 1930. Started to sparge at 0830 the next morning. Temperature was 58C. Flow very slow, so tried blowing up tube, eventually had to stir grist to clear the stuck sparge. Possibly the porage oats! Add them last next time? Had to use a lot of water to sparge, ended up with two pans on the cooker to boil as well as the boiler. Stopped sparging when gravity hit 0.995 at approx 50C, so probably oversparged. Lot of foam at hot break. O.G. 1.071 at 23 litres so excellent extraction efficiency. Added previously harvested 2nd generation WLP005 from previous brew.
26th Nov approx racked onto secondary fermentation F.G. 1.023 as per recipe so 6.4%. May drop further in secondary. 14/12/12 moved to garage. 31st Dec kegged and bottled. FG 1.016 so 7.2%. Lovely beer! Will use less Gypsum next time as Ph was plenty low enough.

[minesapint]

Thanks for the information Anthony.
The mild is on the go and it will be a toss up between Dark Lantern next or Fullers London Porter.
I will deffo be having a go at Dark Lantern soon.
Thanks again and Cheers all.

[TC2642]

Just got done with my RIS yesterday, recipe details are below, I had a look through 'Old British Beers and How to Make them' porter and stout recipe's and came up with this for 22ltrs:

Lenin's Revenge:

7kgs Pale malt
1Kg Tate & Lyle dark brown sugar
500gms Brown malt
500gms Amber malt
250gms Black malt
250gms Wheat malt
S04 yeast cake (from small beer OG 1035, FG 1010)
100gms Magnum 14.1% AA 60 mins

Blew off 1ltr but calmed down after a day. Will wait until fermentation has stopped before transferring and adding 3rd gen Brett yeast to it, wait 2-3months and bottle in time for xmas. OG was 1080. I'm hoping to get this to around 8.7% a.b.v. after souring.

[minesapint]

Hello TC2642
Is the book you mentioned by The Durden Park Beer Circle ? If so, before you pick another brew from their book , you might like to have a look at another of my posts concerning the addition of enzymes for some of their recipes.
Have a look for "Durden Park Enzymes" in my posts.
The replies that I received are very interesting.
Cheers.

[TC2642]

Hello TC2642
Is the book you mentioned by The Durden Park Beer Circle ? If so, before you pick another brew from their book , you might like to have a look at another of my posts concerning the addition of enzymes for some of their recipes.
Have a look for "Durden Park Enzymes" in my posts.
The replies that I received are very interesting.
Cheers.

I'll check it out minesapint

[Barley Water]

I'll just throw this out there in the interest of public safety (ignore if you have already considered this). If you are going to bottle a high gravity beer and do natural carbonation (and especially if you throw brett into the mix) I highly recommend using either champagne bottles or Belgian 750's that have thick glass. You have the potential to develop some serious pressure. The brett will take a long time but it will eat anything that even resembles a sugar and high gravity beers tend to have more unfermented sugars than regular strenght beers. Many of the normal bottles (we call them long necks over here) have thinner glass walls and you could easily lose beer to explosions not to mention bodily injury if you are unlucky. It really tends to kill the holiday mood when you are in the emergency room having glass shards removed from your flesh, know what I mean?

I have an Olde Ale going in a solera (my first batch is roughly a year old now). My plan was to make another batch pretty soon and do a 50/50 blend, store 1/2 for another year and bottle 1/2. To avoid the potential problem alluded to above I thought I would carb up the batch I was going to bottle then use my counter pressure filler rather than do natural carbonation. I wanted to put the beer into 12oz longnecks since 750ml of Olde Ale would get me more into the "holiday spirit" than I usually want to get if that makes any sense (plus I could enter the stuff into a big competition next March).

Anyhow, have fun and "let's all be careful out there".

[minesapint]

Hello Barley Water.
My Twelfth Night was started at 1.088, racked at 1.022 and a month later was still at 1.022. alcohol almost 9% ABV , and then bottled with a little priming glucose.
After reading your post and In the interests of safety, I have just cracked a bottle and its lovely.
SG still 1.022 , clear bright at the edges of the glass, just enough fizz and smells and tastes nice.

I did have my doubts at bottling at so high a gravity but a few more " safety checks" before Christmas will be in order.

Cheers

[Barley Water]

Yes, I believe your safety precautions are prudent. In your particular case I guess I would recommend doing at least a weekly "safety test" to ensure that the carbonation has not gotten out of control.

Ok, I'll tell you a little story (and it's true). I have two soleras going, one with Olde Ale that I mentioned and the other is an Oud Bruin. Every year, I make a new batch, take 1/2 from the solera then refill with the new beer to rest yet another year. Anyway, last summer I made another batch of Oud Bruin and was ready to bottle so I fetched my solera and tried to bleed off any residual pressure before commencing to bottle. To say that the beer in the keg was carbonated is much like saying that Mother Theresa was not exactly a looker, that stuff made Old Faithful (a famous geiser in Yellowstone Park here in the states) look tame. Needless to say I sprayed beer all over my kitchen. Oh, and the stuff was dead flat when I put it into the keg, those bugs in the Oud Bruin munched down big time and built up a ton of pressure. If I had bottled that stuff in regular beer bottles and primed the beer I would have had two cases of hand grenades (with the pins pulled). Now Oud Bruin has on O.G. of about 1.065, just think what those bugs would have done with a much bigger beer, loaded with unfermented sugars and dextrins (which brett has no problems eating). Anyhow, take all that for what it's worth....

[minesapint]

Hello Barley Water, nice to hear from you.
If I did my "safety checks" once a week I dont think there would be anything left for Christmas.
Cheers.

[seymour]

Hello

Seymour kindly sent me an email directing my attention towards this thread; for which he has my grateful thanks. Sincere thank you too, for the many complimentary remarks and kind words about Sensible Mole - reading those caused my head to swell so much that I had difficulty in getting out of the room. In fact I’ve shown this thread to every member of my family (twice), all of my friends, Dixie the guinea pig and next door’s cat. It’s very gratifying to know my recipe and my web site have been greeted by some with such a positive thumbs up.

Dave is right, the site hasn’t been updated since 2007, and I have to say that is a deliberate ploy on my part. I used to be involved in writing for and looking after a web site about rugby; that site had a message board/forum thingy and because comments were made daily, the site had to be moderated all the time - so if you’re not careful, looking after web sites can take over your life. It‘s like looking after a baby, and I just don’t have the time. I just wanted Sensible Mole to be all about how a bloke can brew all grain quite simply, and leave it at that. Having said that perhaps the site could do with a spring clean, or something - I can’t believe it’s six years old. How time flies.

And in answer to Seymour’s question, yes, I’ve been a member on here for some time but I haven’t visited the site for years <hangs head in shame>.

Thanks again for your kind comments, they really made my day.

Happy brewing!

http://www.sensiblemole.com

Bump.

I was just wondering if anyone else has brewed any Sensible Mole recipes? Not just for Christmas anymore.

[Dave S]

Hello

Seymour kindly sent me an email directing my attention towards this thread; for which he has my grateful thanks. Sincere thank you too, for the many complimentary remarks and kind words about Sensible Mole - reading those caused my head to swell so much that I had difficulty in getting out of the room. In fact I’ve shown this thread to every member of my family (twice), all of my friends, Dixie the guinea pig and next door’s cat. It’s very gratifying to know my recipe and my web site have been greeted by some with such a positive thumbs up.

Dave is right, the site hasn’t been updated since 2007, and I have to say that is a deliberate ploy on my part. I used to be involved in writing for and looking after a web site about rugby; that site had a message board/forum thingy and because comments were made daily, the site had to be moderated all the time - so if you’re not careful, looking after web sites can take over your life. It‘s like looking after a baby, and I just don’t have the time. I just wanted Sensible Mole to be all about how a bloke can brew all grain quite simply, and leave it at that. Having said that perhaps the site could do with a spring clean, or something - I can’t believe it’s six years old. How time flies.

And in answer to Seymour’s question, yes, I’ve been a member on here for some time but I haven’t visited the site for years <hangs head in shame>.

Thanks again for your kind comments, they really made my day.

Happy brewing!

http://www.sensiblemole.com

Bump.

I was just wondering if anyone else has brewed any Sensible Mole recipes? Not just for Christmas anymore.

Thanks for the reminder, it's something I mean to do.