The Hop Farms around George

To the best of my knowledge the only place which hops are grown in South Africa (or for that matter Southern Africa) is a small area between George and Oudtshoorn in the Southern Cape. I seem to recall reading somewhere that once up a time they used to grow some in the Zimbabwe highlands but thinks its highly unlikely that this is still the case seeing that Zimbabwe can't even grow sufficient crops to feed itself these days.

On our way back home from Cape Town we passed through this area and I noticed for the first time road signs showing it as the hop route. Unfortunately I didn't have time to stop and enquire as to whether any of the farms offered tours, but will definitely do so the next time I'm in the area.

There has been some discussion of late on the use of lighting when growing hops outside of the traditional hop growing areas of the world. Lights are used extensively in this area for growing hops and even though at this time of the year the hops have died back, I thought it may be of interest to anyone who grows hops to see a photo of the lights used in the hop fields.

Kegging The Bitter

To start, a photo of the pictures on one of the brewery walls.

Well the bitter has been in the primary for a week now and the gravity has been at 1006 for at least 2 days, so today was the day to rack to the fermenter. As is normal whenever I decide to anything in the brewery, it has to be hot. It was 42 deg C in there at lunchtime today (33 deg C outside) and this is supposed to be the early stages of winter ! I didn't get quite as much as I expected into the kegs, probably 35 litres to my expected 38, but the beer looks (and tastes good). The final gravity was 1006 and the ph 4.3 (not sure w
hether the ph is good, bad or in between, but have meter must measure). I managed to collect quite a bit of yeast which I intend using next weekend for a dry irish stout.

The lager which I made a few weeks ago still hasn't cleared and leaves a strange aftertaste in the back of the throat, not sure what it is but it doesn't taste infected or off in any way. I'm going to add some finings later and then forget about it for a couple of months. Not a good first experience with dried lager yeast.

The hops appear to be still growing will despite the fact thats its early winter and they should be dying back by now, mind you with the weather its not suprising they don't know what season it is. You can see on the photo all the new growth. The Great Gardening Experiment continues !

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 !