ag#19 Own Recipe Summer Blonde (again)

Second brew of this beer as myself and other drinkers of it enjoyed the first batch so much (see here: all grain summer blonde)

Not the most exciting of grain bills or hopping but it makes a bloody lovely session bitter.

I'm posting it again because there were a couple of brewing firsts for me in this batch. My first time with gypsum added to the mash and my first mega clear first runnings.

The gypsum was a guesstimate as I hadn't received my water analysis from the water company so I chucked a tablespoon in.

So, Brewday: 4th June 2012

Brew length 25 litres.
Target OG: 1042
Target FG: 1,010

Mash liquor: 11 litres
Total liquor: 38 litres

Maris Otter: 4,171g
Pale crystal: 101g
Flaked wheat: 150g

Hops. (Adjusted from first batch for different alpha acids)

Target: 12.66%AA 25g 90 mins
Fuggles: 3.81%AA 20g 30 mins
EKG: 5.85%AA 13g 10 mins

Flameout and cool to 75C steep for 30 mins
EKG: 5.85%AA 31g
Fuggles: 3.81%AA 31g

1/2 protofloc
Safale SO4 - rehydrated and starter made with 150ml first wort runoff

750ml first wort runoff boiled down to 300ml to caramelize and added at 10 mins from end of boil.

Obligatory dull grain shot

In case the grain shot was too dull, here's a Star Destroyer instead.

2 litres run off to clear the bits and this started flowing from the mash tun. Clearest yet, I don't think it'll get clearer than this.

Caramelizing 750ml first wort - it reduced to 300ml

Blah blah hops, rolling boil etc

Break formed in the caramelized wort - I didn't see this happen first time I tried this technique

Aroma hops steeping at 75C for 30 mins - Temp dropped to 62C during the steep.

Break shite settling

Bang on 1042 OG and 25 litres ran off to the FV

All in all, pretty uneventful other than a neighbour turning up just as I was doughing in to use our internet to find a phone number.

I tested this yesterday, the gravity was down to 1,012 and the sample is tasting very close to batch 1. I might yet decide to dry hop when I rack it off to secondary.

East Kent Blonde - Own recipe all grain pale bitter

I fancied something simple and session-able with the summer coming up (I wish someone would remind the rain gods of this) but also with a bit of interest in the nose and taste. Something quaff-able but with a bit of, "hmmmm what's that?" about it.

Ooops, half way down the first sampler I remembered to take a piccy. Clearest pale beer I've brewed to date.

I went for pale malt, pale crystal and tried just using flaked wheat instead of torrified to see what sort of head retention it gave. I've been reading that flaked wheat behaves the same as torrified but without the flavours torrified can sometimes add. It was absolutely nothing to do with opening the wrong bag and not realising until it had been tipped into the malt bucket...

I also wanted the classic combination of East Kent Golding and Fuggle hops with some target chucked in for its higher alpha acid content for bitterness.

I also figured I'd have a go at caramelizing some of the first run sweet wort after reading a thread on Jim's Beer Kit about the toffee, caramel and vanilla notes this process can bring to a beer.

End result, v nice. Everything I'd aimed for pretty much but I ended up slightly over target OG so from what was meant to be 3.9% abv beer I ended up with a 4.1% - still a lot more session-able than the typical 5.5 to 7% brews.

This is also one I plan to have on hand pull for our summer garden party.

Target brew length: 25l (got 26l)
Mash liquor: 11l
Total liquor: 38l

Mash time: 90 minutes
Boil time: 90 minutes

Fermentables:
Pale malt: 4,170g
Pale crystal: 100g
Flaked wheat (ahem): 150g

Bittering and Late Hops:
Target (12.6%AA) - 11g @ 90 minutes
Fuggles - 11g @ 90 minutes (old bag, pre MaltMiller supplier so %AA unknown)
Fuggles - 20g @ 30 minutes
East Kent Goldings (4.96%AA) - 15g @ 10 mins

Aroma Hops:
East Kent Goldings (4.96%AA): 20g @ 80C steep for 30 minutes
Fuggles (3.81% AA) - 25g @ 80C steep for 30 minutes

Not many pics, I was using my phone camera as my Mrs had pinched my camera to take photos of her handmade bags that she sells on Etsy.

As you can see (bottom left) flaked wheat looks nothing like torrified wheat... Not sure what I was thinking but it worked out ok in the end with a bloody nice, crisp pinter. Just need a bloody nice summer to finally appear now.

First runnings taken in my blurred foreground, sharp background photography style. FFS!

It was looking a little dark in the bucket even once I was sparging but it soon paled down/up.

1 litre of first run sweet wort boiling down next to the main boil...

Reduced to 250ml and a thick syrupy gloop. During this time the smells were absolute toffee and vanilla. Nice!

Chiller in and last hops etc etc yawn usual stuff

Shite heading for the compost bin.

Next time I brew this, all bittering hops in at 90 mins. Some additional EKG and Fuggles in at 10 minutes and then slightly more EKG and Fuggles in for the 80C steep.

It was bitter, it was hoppy but I think (possibly due to the caramel/vanilla notes) the bitterness and hop aroma can stand to go up a bit.

AG#6 All Grain Everards Tiger (ish)

I brewed this beer during the same weekend as my previously posted All Grain Winter Warmer. This recipe is based on the all grain Everards Tiger recipe taken from page 145 of Graham Walker's Brew Your Own British Real Ale. If you don't already have this book, I highly recommend it!!!

I say that this brew is based on the recipe as I chose to replace the 12g of Black malt in the recipe with some Amber malt instead. Why? I found that the addition of the black malt in my all grain, home brew Banks Bitter made the finished beer a little too dark. I also have a surplus of amber malt and so I thought I could kill two birds with one stone and use up some of my amber malt whilst adding some darker colour but not too much. I also like the subtle, biscuity flavours the amber malt brings to the beer.

I also (accidentally) added more Crystal malt and Torrefied wheat than the recipe required, I was getting some weight fluctuations that I didn't spot initially and had to put new batteries in my scales. Too late to remove and reweigh as I had already tipped the grains into the bulk of the pale malt... Next time I shall weigh the grains into separate containers before mixing.

Brewday, Sunday16th October, target volume 23l.

The grain bill:

• Pale malt: 3400g
• Crystal malt: 386g
• Amber malt: 200g
• Torrefied wheat: 197g

The hops:

• 31g Challenger in at start of boil (90 mins)
• 20g Fuggles in during the last 10 minutes of the boil.

200g white sugar to go in approx half way through the boil and as with my last couple of brews I rehydrated the Irish Moss which was added in the last 10 minutes of the boil.

Before bottling I will also be dry hopping with a few cones of Goldings.

Again, the brewday went without any major problems, my equipment is behaving and performing well.

The mash schedule: 10 litres of liquor at 66C for 90 minutes - again my mash tun didn't lose a single degree :) HLT temp was 75C giving me a strike temp in the pre heated mash tun (kettle of boiling water for 20 minutes) of 72C. After the addition of the grains and doughing in I hit the target of 66C bang on.

Unfortunately the yeast starter I had made from some yeast reclaimed from a previous brew didn't appear to get going and so I chose to bin it rather than risk using it. I had one pack of Wyeast 1968 London that I was saving for an ESB I plan to brew soon so I used that.

Target gravity was 1041 but I got 1045. I'm still not up to speed with calculating efficiency but I keep achieving higher gravities. I can only put this down to my mash tun being very efficient and extracting more fermentable sugars from the malted grains. I'm not overly concerned at this point, I'm far from being ready to consider selling my brews, as a slightly stronger beer isn't really a bad thing.

Here are the piccies.

First run off from the mash tun, I'm liking the colour. Note, I ran a couple of litres off into a jug first until the grain bed settled and the wort began to run clearer.

From the initial 10 litres of hot liquor for the mash I extracted about 7 litres of wort prior to sparging.

I heated the hot liquor tank to 80C for the sparge and slowly sparged the grain bed to end up with 25 litres of wort with a gravity around 1039 bearing in mind this lower gravity is pre boil and pre addition of 200g of sugar during the boil. Unable to calculate exactly what the boil and sugar was going to add to the gravity I wasn't sure how much water to add to the wort pre boil.

From previous experience of the evaporation losses, in order to end up with my target of 23 litres I'd need to start the boil with around 30 to 31 litres... I topped up to 30 litres and hoped the gravity would climb to the target 1041 with the evaporation losses and sugar taken into account.

Approaching boil, the hot break material begins to form. As before I skimmed the surface froth away as it formed prior to reaching the rolling boil.

Some of the skimmed surface break material... nice isn't it?

Getting down to business now with a vigorous boil, in go the bittering hops - 31g Challenger. This is my first brew using Challenger and the smell was very nice indeed. I have yet to find hops I don't love the smell of when they go in the boil.

As this was quite an uneventful, other than ending up with 23l of lovely beer, I haven't gone mad on photos. they are all beginning to look a bit samey. You can see the cold break material starting to clump together in the photo above as my home made wort chiller brings the temp down to 30C after the boil. The aroma hops, 20g Fuggles, went into the brew ten minutes before end of boil.

This addition of hops towards the end or after the boil is to me a bit of a pain when using an immersion chiller like above. As the chiller has to go into the boiling wort 15 or so minutes before then end of boil to be sterilized, the (end of boil) hops go in afterwards and tend to get all caught up in the coils of the chiller as they roll around. Not bad to begin with but they gradually collect together and rise up out of the boiling wort. I keep tapping them back in with my brewing spoon but, it's a bit of a pain in the ass.

The hopped sweet wort has been chilled and can be seen running off from the copper into the fermenter.

I pitched the yeast and as with my previous use of wyeast smack pack yeasts, nothing bloody happened for two days! I was beginning to worry the pack had not been viable - I followed the instructions to the T - when finally the brew burst into life and began to ferment.

A day or so later my order of bottles arrived along with some airlocks and grommets so I drilled the fermenter lid and fitted an airlock to it. As I write this, it's still glugging away like a goodun and the gravity is taking longer than normal to drop. This might be due to the slightly lower temperatures now or it might just be the yeast was struggling to get going. So even with my delayed posting, there's no photos of the finished beer just yet.

On the subject of temperatures I am looking to, in the not too distant future, convert and old fridge by way of an external controller with a probe in the beer and a tube heater fitted internally into a temperature controlled fermenting cabinet. More on that soon...

I am about to open a bottle of my Banks Bitter that I have been enjoying recently and, weather permitting, take a nice photo to post later on.

Brewdays - #4 All Grain Banks Bitter

I'm a bit late getting this brew day blogged due to getting chimneys cleaned and fitted out with stainless steel flexible flue liners, wood burners tidied up, firewood sorted ready for winter and rehearsing with my new band (I play drums).

Brewday was 22nd Sept and the recipe is from page 114 of Graham Wheeler's splendid all grain home brewing recipe book, Brew Your Own British Real Ale.

The only modification to my brewing equipment has been the addition of some quick fit hose connectors and a length of brand new hose pipe for my home made wort chiller.

To open with here's the obligatory grain shot. Again, I tried to jazz it up a little by making a smiley face with the grains but it didn't turn out too well.

This wasn't the most taxing of brews although being a newbie to this, I'm not exactly looking for problems. The day went very well all in all and I ended up with 23 litres of very nice smelling hopped wort in the FV.

I pre heated the mash tun again using just a kettle full of boiling water and shut the lid while I prepared a few last minute bits and bobs. After about 10 or 15 minutes I tipped out the boiling water and began to fill the mash tun with 10 litres of hot liqour at 74C (grain temp was 22C), my target mash temp was 67C which I hit bang on when I added the grist and doughed in.

Feeling a lot more relaxed this time, a couple of brew days under the belt makes a lot of difference, I even managed to sneak away and get a big old bacon and mushroom butty on the go. Argh that was the last pack of English bacon left in the freezer. When we have visitors who drive here rather than fly we ask them to bring a few packs of good olde English bacon with them. the French stuff is nice in its own way but it's different and sometimes you just can't beat a proper bacon butty.

The mash (6pH) was left for 90 minutes.

First runnings from the mash tun was very clear after the first couple of litres. It was looking darker than my memory of Banks Bitter however and I remember thinking at the time - when reading the recipe - that there seemed a fair amount of black malt (38g) for such a light coloured beer. (As this is a late post of the brewday I have since bottled and tasted this beer and it is darker than Banks Bitter. Next time I'll half the black malt)

Sparging bar worked really well again, I'm very happy with it. By the time I turned off the sparge liquor (80C) I had 27 litres of lovely wort. Based on my previous losses during the boil I topped this up to 32 litres with fresh water.

Hot break material forming prior to reaching a rolling boil. This brew I did something different having read a couple of posts and had some feedback on Jim's Beer Kit Forum about skimming off the break material froth. Using a slotted spoon, I removed enough frothy scum to almost fill a 2l jug.

Rolling boil reached and the bittering hops (58g Fuggles) went in. I don't know what the exact benefits of skimming the froth is but this time there was no build up sticking and burning onto the edge of the boiler. Surely, as it burns, it must impart some less than desirable flavours into the wort.

10 minutes from the finish of the boil in went 20g East Kent Goldings and a teaspoon of Irish Moss finings. This time I re-hydrated the Irish Moss in approx 100ml of warm water, again having read suggestions to do this. The stuff smells quite strong when re-hydrated and after a few minutes of soaking the water goes slightly jellified - I tipped the whole lot in. The wort chiller had been put in about 5 minutes before that to sterilize in the boiling wort.

I missed a couple of photos here and so after turning off the gas burner and chilling the wort I ended up with this lovely frothy bucket of hopped wort. I pitched the yeast when the temp was down to 25C. The yeast was some of the yeast I'd recovered from my All Grain Courage Directors brewday, good old brupaks ale yeast, that I had made a starter from using dry malt extract a couple of days previously.

The remains of the day ready to go on the compost heap. I donated some of the mashed grains to my Mum who uses them in some her lovely home made breads. The rest of the grains go to our chickens who kindly repay us with wonderful fresh eggs.

Original gravity target was 1,038 and I got 1,039 and I ended up with just under 23 litres so all happy there.

Target Final Gravity was 1,009 and on day five in the fermentation vessel it was 1,010 the following days I was occupied elsewhere and unable to check it so by the time I got around to checking again (Day 8) it was 1,008 giving me around 4.1% ABV higher than the target 3.8%

I racked the wort from the FV into another bucket and sealed it up until I'd have the time to get it bottled. As it turned out that was just a couple of days later so on 1st Oct it was bottled.

Bottled with 80g sugar dissolved in 250ml water - 5ml syringe of priming sugar in each bottle. I didn't batch prime this time due to being a bit rushed and not having the time to clean up and sterilize my HLT that I use when I batch prime. It was definitely a lot slower using the syringe method though so next time I think I'll go back to batch priming.

I had a sneaky taster last night and it's good, very good although obviously a tad green (new). Good priming already and apart from a slight haze, clearing nicely. It is darker though and I don't think quite as hoppy as it should be. The hops are well within their use by date so maybe the quantities need upping a bit. We'll see, once it's had more time to develop... if it gets chance :D

Last few items and first ingredients ordered.

Unfortunately the last few days have seen me having to get some "proper work" done and so my brewing project has been on hold. However I have ordered the remaining kit required, stuff that I can't make myself eg the fermenting bins, thermometer, hydrometer etc

I have also ordered a selection of malted grains (ready crushed), adjuncts and hops:

Pale Malt
Amber Malt
Crystal Malt

Torrefied Wheat - useful in aiding the head formation and retention.

East Kent Goldings Hops
Northern Brewer
Fuggles
Cascade

I am waiting for confirmation of the overseas shipping charge but unless it's way different to what I was quoted by the supplier (I'll hold off naming names until I've been impressed by the service) it should be ok. My initial contact with the supplier has been very positive, helpful and polite.

In the meantime I am going to look at making a wort chiller although I am a bit wary about pumping gallons of cold tap water to waste - some of the heated water (cold to begin with but exchanging heat with the hot wort) can be used for washing equipment etc but... well, it seems to me that in this time of water management I may have to come up with an alternative solution.

Watch this space.

Next post should hopefully be my first brew :)