Tubby's stuff

Brewday 10/3/10 M&S

2010-03-11T18:53:00.003Z

I brewed a nice hoppy pale ale yesterday 40 litres of M&S named after the hops
The brewday can be seen HERE

The yeast is growing well

Brewing a Tetley Bitter clone

2010-02-27T08:33:00.003Z

Following on from This brewday
and the feedback that I received it is time to brew again to try to get closer to the original beer.
Below is the recipe for today

Huntsman Bitter No2

Tubby
Style: 4A Ordinary Bitter
Method: Infusion Mash
Min Recipe Max
O.G. 1.030 1.037 1.038
T.G. 1.008 1.009 1.013
Alc % 3 3.6 3.8
I.B.U.20 25.8 40
S.R.M.6 8.4 14
Ingredients:
4.4 kgs Pale Ale Malt (MASH)
1 kgs Flaked Barley (MASH)
600 g Brown Sugar (EXTRACT)
80 g Chocolate (MASH)
200 g Crystal 80L (MASH)
45 g Pilgrim 9% BOIL 90 minutes
25 g Northdown 7% FINISHING 15 minutes
20 g Northdown 7% DRY minutes
Boil Time: 90 minutes

Mashing Procedure:
Mash Efficienc80%
Add 14.20 litres of water at 75 C to heat mash to 66 C
Sparge with 41 litres of water to yield 40.00 litres to primary
Water Absorbed by Grain: 5.68 litres
Water Evaporated during boil: 15.00 litres
Notes: Yeast, Safale SO4 pitched dry

The grain bill

Mash on (new thermometer, this was going to be thrown out as it is cheaper to buy new ones than recalibrate them)

Mash all tucked up for 90 minutes

End of the mash (2 1/4 hrs instead of 90 min)

45g of Pilgrim hops waiting for the wort

The draff ready to be composted

Coming to the boil

A good rolling boil

I dont normally drink when I'm brewing but the Six nations is on ;)

The 15 minute Nothdown hops and 1/2 a protofloc tablet. These were added along with the immersion chiller and sugar 15 minutes from the end of the boil.

A little higher gravity than expected, so time to liquor back

Colour looks a little light :(

Well aerated :)

Trub

All done and dusted, I ended up with 42 litres at an OG of 1.038
Not the best of brew days, I broke an hydrometer, good job I had a spare and one of my elements in the boiler packed up towards the end of the boil, good job I have two :)

Brewing a Belgian Dubbel style beer

2007-01-28T17:39:00.000Z

Today I brewed a full mash version of a Belgian Dubbel ale and as I "recovered" the yeast for this brew from two bottles of Chimay Red I decided to call it "Chim Chimnay"

Here's the yeast from the Chimay grown on in a starter,
The recipe for today was,

4.5 kg crushed pale malt,

500g crushed amber malt,

500g coarsely ground wheat,

600g white sugar,

25g Perle hops,

10g Saaz hops.

To begin the brew I heated 11 Litres of water to 78º C and added it to my mash tun, the mash tun can be seen below to the left. Once the water was added and stabilised I waited for the temperature to drop to 72º C. Once at this temperature known as "strike heat" I quickly but thoroughly stirred in all the grains, this is known in "Brewspeak" as "Doughing in"

Once doughed in the mash is underway at a temperature of 64º C. The mash can be seen below to the right.

When I was happy that the temperature throughout the mash was OK the lid went onto the mashtun and extra insulation was added to keep the temperature stable for the 1 1/2 hours required for the natural enzymes in the malt to convert the starch in the grains into sugar.

Here's the insulated mash tun.

During the hour and a half waiting time I heated 30 litres of water to 80ºC ready for sparging. Sparging is the brewers term for rinsing the sugars out of the grain.

The sugar solution that is released is known as "sweet wort" (the wort is pronounced "wert") You can be given some strange looks when you tell people that you were "Sparging your wort" at the weekend.

I allow as much sweet wort as possible to drain from the grains before I begin to sparge. Then I simply direct the hot water onto the top of the grains, it then trickles through dissolving the sugars as it goes.

Sparging.

I sparge to collect 7 or so litres more sweet wort than I require to make the final volume of beer. This allows for evaporation during the boil.

The sweet wort is collected in the boiler and the first batch of hops are added. In this case 25g of Perle.

Hops

The wort, which has hops added is now known as bitter wort.

This is boiled for 1 1/2 hours to extract the flavour of the hops, sterilise the wort and remove proteins and other undesirables that could lead to cloudy beer. The Saaz hops were added 15 minutes from the end of the boil to add to the hop aroma in the finished beer.

Boil

After boiling the bitter wort must be rapidly cooled, this is so that dissolved undesirables will precipitate out of solution. It is also beneficial to quickly get to a temperature where the yeast can be added.

I use a copper immersion chiller to rapidly cool the wort.

Chiller

Once cooled to about 25º C the bitter wort is allowed to settle and is then transferred to the fermentation vessel. I do this by running the liquid from the boiler tap into the fermenting bin. This is called dropping.

Dropping

Dropping also serves a second purpose. Yeast requires oxygen initially to be able to reproduce into the quantities required for a successful fermentation. The picture below shows plenty of air has been added by "dropping"

The next stage is to take a sample of wort and check its specific gravity. This will tell us the potential alcohol content of the finished beer. In this case I got a gravity of 1.064 giving a potential of 6.5% A.B.V.

Finally the yeast is added and fermentation begins.

Adding the yeast.

24 hours later and the yeast head has fully developed on the beer.

The dark matter on the nice frothy white yeast head is trub that escaped through the hop strainer. This will be removed before it can fall back into the beer.

Yeast head

Home brewing Help and Fun

2007-01-07T16:00:00.000Z

This site http://thehomebrewforum.co.uk
Not surprisingly known as, The Home Brew Forum, is in my opinion the best British home brewing forum on the Web.
The forum is especially useful as it never takes long to get a well informed response to any question. They are a friendly bunch and it never takes long to get a reply.