I started off rather ambitiously with the "Premium Pale Ale" from Dave Line's book - our local water is very hard indeed and local breweries tend towards pale ales. It took four tablespoons of pH 5.3 just to get the pH below 5.5. Doughing in was otherwise straightforward, but keeping the temperture up in the mash tun for three hours was a little challenging - even with a sleeping bag I needed to add water four times. The starch end point was finally reached at 90 minutes, and I carried on mashing for a further 90 minutes as this is a cask conditioned ale and I wanted a long slow ferment with lots of dextrins for secondary fermenting.
I reckon that keeping the mash tun somewhere warmer would probably help. I suspect that some of the heat loss was from convection in the empty space at the top of the mash tun. Would packing the space with sanitsed bubble wrap help?
Sparging to 1.005 gave me sixgallons of wort, so bang on target according to the book. All going well so far. Boiling was a challenge though, as I had boiled down to my target volume of five *way* before the recommended hour and a half, and certainly before the hot break. I had to add further water several times, but eventually (and with the help of whirlfloc) the hot break was reached. Next time I think I will collect more sparged wort, and boil down to the planned OG rather than a planned volume - unless there are any better suggestions. The plate chiller worked very well reducing the wort temperture to 23 in the fermenter. As you can see from the photos the wort ran very clear from the hop filter, but there was some leaking from the plate cooler - I plan to replace the fittings with hose barbs I can tighten properly with a spanner.
I began the yeast starter (using Gervin ale yeast) thirty minutes before the end of the boil, this wasn't really enough time and as a result the yeast was not really very active when pitched. Also, I don't think that the wort was terribly well aerated, and to make things worse I kicked the fermentation off at 16 degrees (using a chest freezer and ATC-800). It took a little over 36 hours for the yeast head to form, so I kept the fermenter lid on with an airlock in place. Hopefully the closed environment of the freezer probably offered some protection against infection.
Gravity fell as follows (fermenting at eighteen degrees):
OG 44
Day one - 38
Day two - 34
Day three - 23
Day four (yesterday) - 13 - yeast head was starting to collapse, with patches of brew showing so I syphoned to a five gallon carboy and protected the brew with an airlock. I'm away for a few days and didn't want to return home to a naked and unprotected brew.
Syphoning was a tricky (I use a sterile bladder syringe to start the syphon, that was fine, but keeping the tubing sanitised was a nightmare). I plan to add a tap to my fermenter so I can just gravity drain next time. I thought I might add a second tap higher up so I can sample without removing the fermenter from the chest freezer each time - what do you think?
I had lots of fun so far, also found it a bit stressful as I worry about messing up and getting an infected brew. I am sure that when I am supping the fruit of my labours in a few weeks time I will relax about this! Main lesson learned so far is that using a no rinse sanitiser saves a *lot* of time and water.
If you persevered to the end of this post, thankyou - i'll update when ready to drink.
CC
) but the beers have come out well.