Brewing Sunday Part 2

Brewday started off disasterously as the previous evening when I'd turned on the HLT so that I would have my liquor heated up to strike temp for the mash, I'd actually turned on the power to the pumps so at 11am when I was ready to start I had 70 litres od 16d eg C water. Only the supervisor prevented me from giving up on brewing for the day. Anyway I emptied 30 litres out of the HLT and heated up the rest to 82 deg C. Given the ambient temperature of about 16 deg C and the heat lost in the pipes a better temperature would have been 85 deg C (I had to add an additional 3 litres of 82 deg water to reach my mash temp of 67 deg C. After mashing in I took a ph reading with my newly aquired PH meter. The ph at 5.6 was a bit on the high side, which could also be part of the reason I haven't been getting good mash efficiency. Next time I'll add some gypsum if the PH is to high. After a ninety minute mash conversion appeared good and the sparge was commenced. This time I sparged really slowly for just under an hour. I collected 50 litres into the boiler and also boiled for 90 minutes. From then on everything went well, the cooling, the transferring to the fermenter and even the cleaning. The interesting thing is that I missed my anticipated gravity again, but pleasing for me was that my spreadsheet was the closest at an OG of 1035 vs the actual of 1033 (still within the parameters for an ordinary bitter). I will adjust my mash effeciency on the spreadsheet down a little to cater for this and do the same with my next brew (use all three recipe formulators and see which is the closest. My transfer to the fermenter was a perfect colour and really clear which I was pleased about (see the picture below).

One other brewing tool which I must mention is my ipod. I really enjoy listening to all the brewing podcasts (see links) on my ipod via a radio, but for brewday nothing beats the Brewing Networks Sunday Show, its long enough to just about long enough to get you through a complete brew day !