Saturday 26 March 2011

Big Boiler

The other news is that Daz picked me up a 32L aluminium stockpot the other week. I did a test boil this morning. The pot manages to just cover 2 burners, the large and one of the medium. It was a promising start for 24L:
  • 30 mins - 48C
  • 45 mins - 66C
  • 61 mins - 83C
  • 75 mins - 93C
  • 90 mins - 100C
Unfortunately, whilst the pot managed a simmer, it couldn't quite get to a rolling boil, so I turned it off after 120 minutes. I'll have to think about another way to get it boiling, whether that be an electric element or a big gas burner. I popped the lid on and checked the temperature after an hour - 93C. After several more hours it had only dropped to 60C - at which point i nicked some of the water for washing up, and so that I could actually lift the thing to the floor. I needed to get tea on!

I was naughty...

...because of various things going on it took me way too long to get this beer bottled. Hope I haven't ruined it. FG was still 1.008.

Monday 14 March 2011

Beer #11 - Fermented out?

I was away at the weekend so didn't manage to make an early check on the beer, a check this evening shows it at 1.010 which I imagine is fermented out and will make it 4% ABV. Easily the nicest tasting I've had straight out of the fermenter. I'll check again tomorrow and think about bottling.

Monday 7 March 2011

Beer #11 - A bitter

I got a couple of cool books for my birthday last week, Designing Great Beers: The Ultimate Guide to Brewing Classic Beer Styles and Radical Brewing: Tales and World-Altering Meditations in a Glass. I'm just working my way through them and haven't really had time to fully absorb the info in them, but since I had today off thought I would get a brew in anyway.

  • 2kg Mariss Otter pale malt
  • 40g Biscuit malt
  • 200g Munich malt
  • 230g Crystal malt
  • 28g Challenger -60 minutes
  • 14g East Kent Goldings -15 minutes
  • 14g East Kent Goldings -0 minutes
Again, the brew in a bag method was used getting about 8.6L of 1.060 wort in the stockpot. I also dunk sparged the bag in a spare fermenter which gave about 6L of 1.0?? wort which I used to top off where the pot had lost volume to evaporation during the boil. In the end I was left with just under 10 litres into the fermenter at about 1.058 (I think), which I diluted down to between 12-13L and a OG of 1.040. The yeast went in after a bit of cooling time. I had had the pot in the sink but without the sink plug that has gone walkabouts it was somewhat more difficult. I used the cooling time to wander up to the plot and drop the spent grains off in the compost, tidy up a bit and cook tea.