Hot, Quick and Thick

I have a nice simple brew planned for tomorrow:

Southern Brewer

28L
OG 1.045
FG 1.011
ABV 4.5%
25 IBU
15 EBC

5.7kg JW Trad Ale (95%)
300g JW Caramalt (5%)

Northern Brewer bittering
20g Northern Brewer @ 10 mins

US-56 dried yeast

60min mash @ 66°C
60 min boil

I want to do more simple beers over the course of this year, and I think this one is a good start. My ideal aim is to have it so I never run out of simple session beers yet will always have more interesting styles like the IPA and the Saison on hand. I think it’s good homebrewing PR to have “normal” beer on hand for those folks who aren’t familiar with all those funny weird beers.

It’ll also be the largest-volume beer I’ve brewed to date, I have the capacity now so I might as well start using it. At some point in the future I will look at doing split batches with two different yeasts and at partigyle brewing.

Well, not a new one in any sense of the word. Sometime a year or so ago a friend and I bought a fridge and installed a new thermostat in it for cheesemaking. The fridge has been residing in their residence since then, as it was the residence with more room for residing.

However, since I’ve moved I have more room for things like multiple fridges, and we haven’t made any cheese in ages so I now have the fridge here. It’s keeping the beer fridge company in the carport.

Obligatory photos:

Not much to look at, but loads of personality. Or something.

Check out the quality professional work on the new thermostat.

Unfortunately I can’t fit two fermenters in it. I can probably do a fermenter and a jerry on the bottom shelf and a cube on the top, though.

In there at the moment is my wort kit IPA, coming down from 22 to 20 or so, fridge is set at 18 and running nicely. Both it and my saison are fermenting a little sluggishly. Saison is sitting comfortably at 25°C in my bathroom and starting to pick up the pace on the ferment.

I brewed my first beer at the new location and on the new gear yesterday. I would say the day was successful. I took photos but couldn’t be bothered resizing and uploading them.

Fired up the HLT at 1 PM, on 3 rings the burner took 19 minutes to heat 17L of water to strike temp. I decided to forego the big HLT and just used a cheap 19L pot instead, just tipping the water into the tun. Makes it a lot easier to try and hold a stick thermo in there.

Strike water went into the esky before the grain, grain went in with a minimum of doughballage. The paddle took care of what few balls there were no worries, and the manifold stayed in place perfectly. Hit mash temp almost perfectly, 67°C. The tun bulkhead leaked a tiny little bit but stopped in short order. I was expecting this as I didn’t have anything to tighten the lock nuts with other than my hands.

There’s a bit of heat loss from the tun though, I lost 3-4 degrees over an hour, I was originally going to do a 90 minute mash but cut that to around 70 once I realised I was losing temp. I figure my options are to other cut a piece of styrofoam to sit on top of the mash for more insulation, or brew bigger batches so there’s more thermal inertia.

Flow from the tun was very good, this recipe had only 10% wheat but I am looking forward to trying a wheat beer and seeing how the flow holds up. Ran clear very quickly on the vorlauf, and I ended up with 10L of first runnings in the kettle at 17°Bx. I was hoping for (though not really expecting) a water loss if 1L/kg grain, so it seems two more litres stayed in there somewhere.

Sparged with an additional 17L, sparge water at 80°C then 72°C once in the tun. Second runnings were 7°Bx for 15 litres, giving me 25L in the kettle at 10°Bx.

On 4 rings the burner took 18 minutes to bring the wort from 60°C to the boil. I had a bugger of a time keeping the boil consistent; every time the wind died down the kettle would boil over. I did not lose too much to boilovers, as I caught it almost just in time each time. The kettle spigot did not leak, which I am glad about. However I do have to apply thread tape to it which I do not like; it makes it a lot harder to keep clean and that’s the only spot in the system where cleanliness is a real issue. I will probably replace the spigot with threaded pipe and a ball-valve at some point.

I made a rather poor attempt at a whirlpool then went to the service station to buy a bag of ice (and an iced coffee). On returning I racked from the kettle to a clean fermenter and dumped it in the laundry trough along with the bag of ice. Despite the poor whirlpool the end result was only 2L loss to trub (with a tiny little bit of hop debris in the fermenter). Final volume was 19L, 17L in fermenter. I topped up to 19 with filtered water and the yeast starter comprised another litre. Did not pitch the starter till around midday today.

Just a side note, cooling in the laundry trough is a temporary measure; I intend to buy the Shirron plate chiller from morebeer.com at some point when I can afford it. For now I also need to make sure I can get the wort out of the kettle with almost no hop debris or other trub in it, as I don’t like the thought of trying to clean it out of that sucker.

Dropped to a new fermenter a few hours ago for a bit of aeration and it’s now sitting outside at around 25°C. End result was 20 litres at approximately 1.050, at the low end of the saison scale but almost exactly what I was aiming for. Efficiency is roughly 65%, nothing stellar but again almost exactly what I estimated I would get and that’s the important bit.

And now we wait.

I have had a rather long-term plan towards upgrading from kitchen to outdoor brewing, and the last couple days have seen some rather rapid steps in that direction. I had fun on Thursday playing with my bits and pieces, and thought I would write about the direction my brewing is taking.

First we have the paddle. Cost me nothing thanks to the generosity of a fellow brewer, but are cheap as chips in any case:

Next up is a jug. Everyone needs a jug, especially a sexy 5L one like this.

Its first task will be measuring quantities in my HLT and my kettle so I can score them onto my paddle.

Next we have the hot liquor tank:

It’s a dodgy old converted keg that I bought for $50, tap inclusive. I was originally going to use it as a heated mash tun, till I found a better offer. For the first few brews I am probably not even going to use this, I have a cheap 19L pot that will hold enough to serve as a HLT for 5kg batches.

I also bought the hose fitting for the HLT’s valve today, though I have decided not to use a hose for it at least at first. However, I do wonder how big a difference there would be in heat loss between running hot liquor through a hose into the mash tun and just pouring it in free.

And now we come to the mash tun:

It’s not even my esky, I was given permission to borrow my father’s on the condition that I ‘keep it clean’. And another shot of it:

It’s a 55L esky, I should be able to mash around 10 kg of grain in it with no worries at all. There’ll be no doing that while I still have to lift equipment around, though.

The manifold in it looks thusly:

I chose a SS mesh one because they’re easy to make and the mesh was readily available. Both good reasons for the lazy brewer and the unskilled handyman. I’m not worried about channelling since I will be batch sparging. I’m not expecting my efficiency to be out of this world, but if I can get 70%, especially on the first brew, then I will be content.

It’s also not attached properly in this picture. I was going to use SS hose clamps to hold it on, but there’s a gap in the underside of the mesh near the threaded pipe. I’ve since changed my mind and narrowed the diameter of the final inch so I could just jam it inside the pipe.

Here’s the kettle:

It’s a 60L aluminium pot that I picked up for $80 last year sometime. I even had someone else drill the hole for me (thanks Jaz!). I still need to file the edges of the hole down a little before I use it.

The thread on the tap pictured is very short, and I am a little concerned that it will not seal properly. Time will tell.

Next is the pickup in the kettle:

The pickup tube was from the keg that I’m going to use for a HLT. It’s just jammed into there, so (again) I don’t know if it will leak or not. It’s in pretty tight though. Like everything else, I have no idea how well this will work. I also had fun buying all these bits and pieces from the hardware store, I had no idea what I needed and was just grabbing bits and pieces that looked approximately right. Most of them were, fortunately.

It’s also nice to have a bit of copper in there.

This is my newest purchase, four rings of pure power. Not that I’ve ever used one, but it certainly looks the part. It’s even too wide for the HLT so I’ll have to run it on three rings when heating that. I plan to pick up a cheap 3-ring second hand soon for the HLT. Tomorrow I’ll go buy a gas bottle if I can find somewhere that doesn’t charge like a wounded bull for one.

And lastly, here’s the general layout I’ll be using when I brew:

Clearly it won’t be jammed into the corner by the aircon like that, I’ll bring it further out into the open. And there will be some bricks right under the burner to stop it from boiling the desktop. I picked up some tubing today for running between the mash tun and kettle and kettle to fermenter. No chiller yet, that’s a future purchase. For the moment I’ll just cool overnight in ice water.

I bought 5 kilos of grain today for my saison and my pack is smacked and swollen. If all goes well then tomorrow I will be popping the cherry on my new system. It’s certainly a step up from the kitchen brews.

http://zago.it/en/hy75.htm

I bought a bottle of this recently for a paltry $26.95. The description on the site is pretty much correct, but what it doesn’t mention is how sweet and full-bodied it is. It’s fruitier than a Sydney parade and thicker than two short planks. I would call it a real dessert beer, with no accompanying dessert needed.

Out of curiosity I mixed it back with a little of my dark ale. I tried this again the other night and the burnt flavour of the black malt has died down immensely. It mixed well with the HY beer, the black malt flavour cut through the sweetness well and turned it into what would be a very fruity (and strong) porter.

…for I have sinned. It has been over a month since my last brew session.

That was the American wheat, brewed on 3rd of Dec as a quick turnaround beer for Christmas. After that I didn’t have the time to do it, plus moving house put a damper on brewing plans.

I’m also not counting the dump & stir nor the wort kit wort as brewing. I dumped the kit beer the other day, it was horribly average, solventlike and I’d ran out of time to bottle before moving.

And speaking of moving, I am sitting on the carpet in the corner of the lounge room of my new place of residence. I have a magnum of American wheat, the final bottle of the batch, to celebrate my first night here and for a beer that had the shadow of infection looming over it, it is damned fine.

It has been a very variable beer, to begin with it was thin and watery, at Grumpy’s someone said it had a metallic taste. At Christmas (which it was intended for) it had a real nectarine flavour and aroma to it which was gorgeous, but the beer was still a little thin. All throughout it has had a wonderful lemony hint of Glacier. This final bottle is still light in body but the carbonation has reached a point where it makes the texture beautifully creamy.

This brings my beer supplies down to nine bottles of imperial stout, a few bottles of tettnunga (guess the hop) dark ale with too much black patent, a couple bottles of australian stout with too much roast barley, and around half a batch of Old Regret, an aussie strong/sparkling ale with a fusel issue. Funny how the bad batches always stick around.

I had one recently, first ever. It’s been across three batches, but the same infection as by the time I figured out the first one, two more beers had hit the fermenters used for it, and they clearly hadn’t been cleaned properly.

It really starts with a lackadaisical approach to cleaning your fermenters, stemming from only brewing or bottling when you have a couple hours to spare at the end of a night. That means fermenters sitting around for weeks or more with beery dregs in the bottom, and when brewday comes you realise at around midnight, while the wort is cooling, that you need to clean one.

Then, I brewed an alt using SAF K-97 dried yeast. The yeast was dry-pitched at some horrible hour of the morning, and took around 4 days to fire up. The beer did not taste nice once the ferment finished, so it had an extended primary and secondary as often happens when I’m not too thrilled about a beer and am too busy to tend to it. Once it hit the bottle and conditioned for a few weeks, I noticed a film had developed on the surface of the beer, one that transferred to the glass and looked like this.

The next troublemaking beer I put down was vaguely an india pale ale. It suffered from a stuck ferment, I think because it was a very impromptu brew so I had no starter, but I did have a whitelabs 008 tube so I used that. I think the yeast was not quite up to the job, but it’s the first time I’ve used a pitchable tube. Anyway, the upshot was that the beer sat in primary at 1.020 for a few weeks.

Inbetweentimes, I brewed an American wheat using 1010 as a quick turnaround christmas beer. From an OG of 1.042 (and with a good starter) it fermented out in three days, I left it for another couple, racked to secondary for another few days, then bottled. A couple days into bottle conditioning, I noticed the same film as in the alt. Just under a week in bottle, I threw the whole batch into the fridge and left it, and it was fine.

The india pale, however, developed this, and still had not fermented out fully. I gave up on it and turfed the batch.

And then, we come to my reason for writing this post. Being rather disheartened by that point, I gave one of my fermenters the cleaning and sanitising of a lifetime then did a dump & stir of a coopers draught kit plus a ‘booster pack’ that has been sitting around here for at least a year. The intention here was to see if the infection would rear its ugly head again, and if it did after the clean I gave my gear then I would probably cry a little.

Tonight I decided the beer had been in the primary long enough to give the all-clear. I was originally going pour the beer down the drain once I reached this point, since it was really just a cheap way of green-lighting my cleaning process. However, I’ve reached a point where I’m running awfully low on beer, so out of curiosity I decided I’d follow through and bring this batch to bottle. I racked it to secondary on top of a freezer-bag’s worth of homegrown chinook hops that I’ve been meaning to use for almost a year now. I will leave it for a few days on that, then bottle to PET. Then, a few weeks later we’ll see what my first kit & kilo for over a year tastes like.