Brewday 23/06/07 Traquair House Ale with Pictures

[bluesboy]

Brewed Traquair House Ale with my young apprentice

Maris Otter in

Weighing in

Start mashing

Mashing

Running off

Sparging

Sparge arm

Boil

Fermenting under the stairs

Time for a beer


Cheers

[Vossy1]

Great Pic's BB

I bet the apprentice was as white as a ghost after he/she finnished weighing that malt

I've got this ale maturing, only about another 4 weeks ti'll it's ready

[bluesboy]

I was making 2 batches of Traquair the cool box and the Youngs fermenting bin both are used for mashing, I sparge in both of them.

[Garth]

good pics bluesboy, nice handpump

I bet the missus never ventures into that cupboard

[MrD]

Nice pics - what method do you use to hand pump the beer?

The last picture just shows the pump and a pipe leading to something......?

MrD

[bluesboy]

The Missus rarely goes into the cupboard (under the stairs) but the man from the Lecy Board and Gas Man do to read the meters, I get some strange looks from them, wonder why?

Drawing beer into the hand pump is a bit of an experiment at the moment I am just filling plastic bottles from the cornies with enough beer to last a few days. It seems a bit pointless to draw from the cornies then put it into a plastic bottle then dispense with the hand pump, but there you go! I have tried collapsible polypins with little success. A cask breather has been mentioned as a possible solution but I don't want anything too complex.

[prodigal2]

Great pics there bluesboy, and I like the pump clip you have

Do you have a recipe you could post as this is a beer I see so rarely that I would love to make it

[Frothy]

Great stuff bluesboy, glad to hear it went well. With the hand pump setup this is how I worked it -
You can get away without using a cask breather and just setting the gas reg very low which is one reason I was told that cask breathers are now hard to get hold of (Harmony Hut do have them.) The only consideration is that the keg needs to seal air-tight without the need of pressure, some do and some don't.

Frothy

[bluesboy]

Traquair House Ale

This recipe is quite old and comes from someone who was a technical advisor to Traquair House some years ago.

He said "the grist was 99% pale malt and 1% roasted barley, 5lbs of Goldings hops were used for 200 gallons of beer with an additional 3lbs late hopped, mash temperature was 147 degrees F".

I used for 5 gallon
7kg of Maris Otter
40 gms roast barley
65 gms Goldings at 4.3% start of boil
20 gms Goldings last 15 minutes
Irish moss last 15 minutes

Mash temperature 65 deg C (149 deg F)
Boil for 90 minutes
Yeast Safale 33 and Nottingham (I split the beer into 2 fermenters for experimentation purposes)

My final OG was 1078 which is higher than THA at 1070, but I left it there as I will enter this beer into a strong ale class later.

The Traquair house website indicates crystal is used now and Roger Protz's The Real Ale Almanac 1997 has black malt? in the recipe instead of roast barley and 35 units of bitterness.

[prodigal2]

Great "BiroCAD" Frothy.

That has answered a couple of questions I was just thinking about.

[prodigal2]

Traquair House Ale

This recipe is quite old and comes from someone who was a technical advisor to Traquair House some years ago.

He said "the grist was 99% pale malt and 1% roasted barley, 5lbs of Goldings hops were used for 200 gallons of beer with an additional 3lbs late hopped, mash temperature was 147 degrees F".

I used for 5 gallon
7kg of Maris Otter
40 gms roast barley
65 gms Goldings at 4.3% start of boil
20 gms Goldings last 15 minutes
Irish moss last 15 minutes

Mash temperature 65 deg C (149 deg F)
Boil for 90 minutes
Yeast Safale 33 and Nottingham (I split the beer into 2 fermenters for experimentation purposes)

My final OG was 1078 which is higher than THA at 1070, but I left it there as I will enter this beer into a strong ale class later.

The Traquair house website indicates crystal is used now and Roger Protz's The Real Ale Almanac 1997 has black malt? in the recipe instead of roast barley and 35 units of bitterness.

Thankyou for that Bluesboy, I did not think it would be such a simple recipe. A definate to do then.

How long do you recon it needs to be laid down to hit its best?

[bluesboy]

With a strong ale like THA I would be expecting its best to be at around 6 months if bottled.

THA have a good website showing photos and sell the beer 24 x 330 ml bottles for £44

http://www.traquair.co.uk/brewcycle.html

Cheers

[prodigal2]

With a strong ale like THA I would be expecting its best to be at around 6 months if bottled.

THA have a good website showing photos and sell the beer 24 x 330 ml bottles for £44

http://www.traquair.co.uk/brewcycle.html

Cheers

Great beer, great site. You can tell they really believe in their product
Oak FV's, Flamethrower sterilisation process?

[Garth]

what problems did you encounter with the collapsible polypin, Bluesboy?

It's just I have a 10 litre one with a Styrian Stunner in it and I was planning to handpump it in about a week at a family do.

I haven't actually tried it yet through the handpump apart from drawing off 'samples' to release the pressure.

[bluesboy]

The polypin didn't collapse! It just stayed full of gas from the beer, this was over a few days, each day it would pump itself up and not collapse as I thought. That is not going to be a problem if you just empty it in one session though.

Maybe I just did someting wrong as others seem to use them with the hand pump.