Brewing beer #6

Leaving the starter culture for a while paid off, I started to see a bit of a foam and some accumulation of yeast on the side of the measuring jug. And thus it was time to brew.

I started the base wort off to come up to the boil and then realised I had no bag for the hops. Netto to the rescue - I bought 10 crappy dishcloths for a quid -they're essentially a cotton bag, so I snipped the corner and packed them with the hops. Same with the late addition, they went in another dishcloth bag.

So the other balls up was I forgot to account for the 2L volume of the starter, so I have a lot of volume in the fermenting vessel. If the ferment is in anyway vigorous then we'll probably see that foaming over. Oops. I have stuck a towel round the base of the bin in advance this time. Wasn't far off the OG I'd predicted at ~ 1.042 (it was difficult to read the hydrometer - I need a sample jar), so predicted abv is 4-4.3%.

An observation is that this DME was less prone to clump than the wheat -provided it didn't hit the spoon, my hand or the side of the pan/fermenting bin.