So Far So Good

Did a gravity check tonight. Dropped nicely to 1030. The fermentation temperature is 15 deg C. Tasted the sample, not quite as bitter as I expected but that may change as the sugars are gobbled up.The photo shows clearly just how pale the beer is. I guess at this rate total fermentation will take about 10 days.

24 March 2007 Another Day Another Brew

Bottled both the Mild Ale and the Dry Stout yesterday as well as doing another brew. The Stout came out really well, but the Mild Ale is watery and insipid and badly underhopped. I think that all of my ingredients are well past there sellby date by now. Having said that mixed together they make a pretty good brew.
My new brew is a lightish lager and I used pale malt and sugar. Again I missed the gravity (think that my malt is past it) so added some malt extract in to boost the gravity . The recipe was as follows for 36 litres :-
6.6 kilo's pale malt
500 grams white sugar
1 kilogram pale malt extract.
32 grams Southern Brewer hops (pellets) at 11% alpha acid for 90 minutes
10 grams SAAZ hops (whole hops) at 4% alpha acid for 15 minutes.
1 teaspoon irish moss into boiler for last 15 minutes of boil.
Single infusion mash for 90 minutes at 65 deg C.
Boil Time 90 Minutes.
Yeast was Youngs Lager Yeast (Dry Yeast Sachet) made up to a 2 litre starter.

I did the basics of the recipe on a simple spreadsheet I created which can be seen here.
The green beer transferred to the fermenter was remarkably clear and pale (see the picture above)with a gravity of 1038 so I expect an ABV of about 4%, which is roughly what I was shooting for. The ambient temperature was around 30 degrees so it was impossible to cool down below 29 degrees, so I tranferred into the fermenter at 29 degrees and left in overnight in the fridge to cool down to my required pitching temperature of 10 degrees C.Yeast was added this morning and hopefully by now its bubbling away

First Entry 11 March 2007

Well my first blog entry. Have finished the modifications to my brewery and eventually got around to brewing 2 weeks ago. The brew went well and everything seemed to go OK. I brewed a mild ale based on a recipe from Graham Wheelers book Homebrewing. The final recipe is basically pale malt, black malt, wheat flour (I used normal cake flour) and invert sugar (I used golden syrup) together with some target hops. Everything went well but when I was finished I realised that I hadn't let the cooled wort stand after the whirlpool, oh well its at least a dark coloured beer. Overall though not a bad first brew. My major problem is getting the pump for the whirlpool primed.
After a week in the fermenter I racked into two corny kegs and cropped the yeast for use in my next brew, which I eventually did yesterday. This time a dry stout using extract. You can see by the photo of the yeast after 12 hours that it took off like an express train