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 !