Daddy's Day

Well tomorrow is Mothers day so I decided to make today Daddy's day and do another brew. A dry irish stout. The day went well with me measuring the ph of every step of the way. One of the things I did for the first time today was add some gypsum to the mash tun to bring the ph down a little (From 5.6 to 5.2). The amazing thing for me was that I was drinking a coke at the time and for interests sake checked the ph of the coke as well 2.71 !!!! No wonder it gets used for removing rust.

The stout recipe to give me a final volume into bottles of 38 litres was

4.5 Kg pale malt

750 grams roasted barley

120 grams chocolate malt

900 grams cane sugar

46 grams southern brewer hops at 10% alpha acid.

Single infusion mashed at 67 deg C.

Yeast SAFALE 04 (cropped from primary of Bitter)

I got good conversion and think that the colour is almost right (it could be a little blacker). The only real problem that I had all day was battling to get the pump for the whirlpool chiller to prime. I will have to have a good look at why it is only that pump which I cannot get to prime, but nothing obvious springs to mind. Tou can see in the pics below the iodine test for conversion which was good and the start of the recirculation where you can clearly see the colour of the wort.

This picture of the wort is of the first running but the colour stayed extremely dark all the way through the sparge to the last runnings.An interesting observation is that when I emptied the mash tun all the roast

barley seemed to have settled in one place. I have no idea why that would be.

The bitter which I kegged last week seems to be coming along nicely. I needed a name for it and seeing that it was supposed to have 36 gravity points and only ended up with 33, gave me the name. "Wannabee 36" or abbreviated "1AB36". Pam our brewing supervisor and insiration for the brewery name can be seen in my proposed label.