Brewing Sunday Part 1

Well, its the long weekend and as mentioned in my last post one day this weekend was going to be brew day, the only change was that instead of a stout I decided to do a British Style Bitter !! I started by relistening to the Jamil Show on the style , unfortunately the recipe discussed mentions a whole lot of ingredients that we in South Africa don't have easy access to, so I created my own recipe loosely based on a recipe in Grham Wheelers CAMRA book on homebrewing. The recipe which is for 42.5 litres (which gives me a collected volume of 38 litres or two 19 litre (5 US Gallon) corny kegs is as follows :-

6kg Pale Malt
0.33 kg Crystal malt
0.215 kg light Brown Sugar
35 grams Southern Brewer Hop Pellets (approx 9% Alpha Acid) boiled for 90 minutes.
32 grams Fuggles whole hops (approximately 4.5% Alpha Acid) boiled for 15 minutes.
Single infusion mash at 67deg C for 90 minutes.
1 teaspoon irish moss for 15 minutes.
1 sachet 11.5 grams Fermentis Safale S04 ale yeast made up into 2 litre starter.

I created the recipe using my own spreadsheet and then entered the same recipe into beer tools and Qbrew. My idea was to see which came closest to the actual gravity achieved. So armed with my recipe brewday was about to begin !

Preparing To Brew

Well, we have a long weekend coming up at the end of the week and I've decided that at least one day will be dedicated to making another stout. I started preparing today by milling the malt. I've had some difficulty with this recently due to some fairly extensive wear on the shaft of the mills roller. This is where the electric drill is attached making it difficult to get the drill to stay connected to the mill. Anyway I eventually got it milled. I decided on a finer crush as I have not been getting the expected gravities from the mash with my last couple of brews. Hopefully this will help. You can see how finely I crushed the malt in the photo. I took the opportunity whilst out in the brewery to water the hop plants in their temporary home. I'm a little confused as to what to do with them as we are just entering winter here and I would have thought that by now they would have gone "dormant", but that doesn't appear to be the case and they seem to be doing quite well. As I said before I'm no gardener !

Labeling my Bottles

I thought I'd do a short blog about how I do my labels for bottles. I create the label in MS Word and then copy it 9 times in the word document. When thats done I then print the required number of pages. Here comes the tedious part, I then cut out each label by hand place about 6 carefully into a laminating sleeve and laminate. Each label is then cut out ensuring that enough is left on the top to punch a hole in with a normal office punch. An elastic band is then looped through the hole and the label hung over the neck of the bottle. Why did I do it this way, well firstly the labels are reusable, they look pretty good and being plastic can be written on with a Koki pen. This means you could design a label for your favourite style and write onto the back of the label the specific details of a particular batch, when the bottle is empty the label is removed, the specifics wiped off the back of the label with a damp cloth and the label stored for use with the next batch. I think it adds a nice finishing touch (and hopefully if the design is good enough a distraction if the homebrew isn't). You can see in the photo to the left how effective these labels are, well I think so anyway !!

A Weekend Update

Well in the past few days I have planted the hops, roasted some barley and bottled the rest of the Mild Pam and PMS. Planning my next brew which will be another stout. Going to try a different recipe this time, adapted from Charlie Papazians book. Received the photos which Llew took when he came to drop off the hops. You'll see on the photo that he insisted on standing next to Pam. A photo of the planted hops will follow as soon as they look like they haven't died.

The Great Gardening Experiment Begins

Firstly please understand that I'm not an avid gardener, in fact I'm not a gardener of any kind ! Having said that since I started brewing I've always wanted to try growing hops. This even after reading somewhere that growing hops is gardening, not brewing. I was fortunate to be able to source some hop rhizomes from Llew of the Worthog Brewers in Pretoria/Johannesburg. Llew was gracious enough to bring these down to Port Elizabeth for me yesterday, so today they will be temporarily planted in a plant pot until I have prepared my garden for them. See the photo above of the rhizomes I got.

Llew also had a look at my brewery and tasted both my mild and stout. As a certified BJCP judge his comments were invaluable and I will be making some modifications to my recipe based on them. See also the photo of the stout label.

Checked the gravity of the lager again yesterday and it was at 1018 so my guess of two weeks was a bit shy.

Another Check

Checked the garvity again today, now down to 1026 at a temperature of 12 deg C. Could definitely take more than two weeks to ferment out. As always I had a taste of the sample and I think that the final product will be a good beer. We'll have to wait and see. Went away for the weekend and took some of both the mild ale and the stout along. Both beers have got better with age, although the mild could do with slightly more bitterness some of the esters, which were quite pronounced have mellowed. Anyway heres a photo of the mild together with its label.