AG#4 Sarahs hue of dark chocolate ruby mild

[MMBrewing]

Greetings from the KISS brewery, today we are "working" from home and following a busy weekend of demolition and skip filling with no brewing I am making up for it by banging out a large portion of Mild .

the grist:

MO 6550 g
Crystal 1180g
Chocolate 120g

Liqor treated with CRS after checking with the salifert kit again , campden tabs 1 per 20L, Gypsum 5g in with the mash

So this is a bIg bucket of grains for sure. I took the oppertunity to ditch my small cooler MT and I'm giving an old brew bucket with a stainless hose in the bottom a go.

This has showed up a shortcut of mine bigtime and it has been a bit of a struggle to get a stable mash temp of 67 deg - especially the potential for variation throught the mash unless it gets really well stirred.

I persevered with adding hotter/colder water and i'm happy its sitting around 67 now, going to give it a full 90 minutes whilst i do some work...

The hops:
Fuggles: 36g (90 min)
Goldings: 36g(90 min)

Fuggles: 36g(10min)

Still no cooler but i have a plan for running my cunning waterbutt heatsink in the future, more on this in the summer when it will be at its least efficient, we'll see if its worth doing by doing a proper experiment wiv all my best schoolboy physics writeup malarky.

more later, have fun at work everyone...

[MMBrewing]

hot break done, nice rolling boil on the propane. saved some wort and chilling that down to make a starter. it will be ready to pitch sometime tomorrow after an overnight chillout for the big pot of bubbling lovelyness in the garage

[MMBrewing]

cooled overnight and jugged it into two FV's in the end as ended up with slightly over 30L, Nottingham pitched (as a 1L starter per FV) and tucked away for a nice slow fermentation.

Definately need to fit a hop filter on the copper. the mash tun was stretched to bursting with the grain bill, I think I have found its limit. It didn't lose much temperature but the mash was pretty stiff, post boil I had a wort at 1048 @20c so somewhat down on target but happy all the same. If I make this again I'd have to scale it back to 20L I think or wait until a massive igloo comes along at the right price.

[MMBrewing]

this is at 1.033 this morning, going well, stuck the sample in the fridge to check the colour.

[Gricey]

Good luck, I hear good things about Sarah Hughes, never tried it myself.

[MMBrewing]

I love the colour of this , its been down at 1.010 for a few days now, just waiting to bottle it up and put it to bed. It tastes delicious and I think its ready to drink now really, although it will have to wait a few days to polish itself up in the bottles.