After my last all grain session I took away a few ideas on how to improve the process that I was keen to try out. The first was to set up the mill outside, to limit the clean-up process
This worked well, although grinding 4 1/2kg of barley in the middle of the day was hard, hot work. Next time I'll do it the evening before!
I also ground the barley to a much finer level this time, which should enhance the yield of sugars that I can extract out of it with my 'brew in a bag' style method.
I hit my first hurdle after bringing the water to temperature - when I poured the grain into the stock pot / brew kettle it didn't slide into the water in the way that it usually does - the finer grind meant that it sat on top of the water and formed little clumped islands. I needed a lot more and more vigorous stirring to break the lumps up and get the grain into the pot, and that lead to a bit of messy overflow. Next time I'll take more water out of the pot, and add it in afterwards.
Apart from that the mash, sparge & boil went as normal. I used 4 1/2kg of Marris Otter and 1kg of wheat with a 90 minute mash and then dunk sparged twice, as before. This will be an IPA so I used 80g of Fuggles at the start of the boil and 120g of East Kent Goldings with 5 minutes to go, and I added in a kilo of jaggery with 30 minutes to go. Jaggery is a Sri Lankan palm sugar with a rich caramel flavour, and to enhance the maple notes I also used a couple of teaspoons of fenugreek seeds. The use of 'adjuncts' like sugars & herbs to change the flavour profile and to boost the sugars is a little contentious in brewing, but as you may have guessed I don't really care about the Reinheitsgebot.
After the boil was done I let the beer cool in a waterbath in the laundry sink overnight. Then I transferred it to the fermenter - normally I scoop the wort out of the pot by hand and pour it through a sieve to catch the hop pellets, but this time I tried re-using the brew bag in the fermenter as a kind of filter. It was a lot quicker to pour the wort directly in, but then I needed to hoist the bag out and let it drain off. So the overall time saving turned out to be minimal.
Admittedly that may be due to the ridiculous amount of hops I'm using!
The other mistake I made was not boiling all of my sparged wort the day before. Remember I'm dunking my 'used' bag of grain into water in order to extract the most sugars out of it, and then using that slightly sugary water to add to my fermenter to minimise the dilution of the beer. That sparge water needs to be bought to the boil to sterilise it before it's added to the beer, and then cooled back down to room temperature again. I'd used up all my big pots on the main boil so had to do this the following day, which added a lot to the 'faff factor' and tied up the laundry sink for another half a day - I think next time I'll invest in a 25l 'beer cube' (essentially a large plastic container) and use that to hold both the hot main wort and the sparge water overnight. That'll save on water and will also free up a pot.
The other problem I have is the heat - we're in the middle of a Spring heatwave at the minute and the temperature of the laundry is reaching 30 degrees during the day. This is too high for the yeast I'm using so I'm resorting to iced waterbaths and evaporative cooling by soaking an old hoody in water. That hoody kept me warm on any number of camping trips - it's huge so fits over anything else I'm wearing - and it's funny to think of it keeping beer cool now. Not sure how effective it is, I may need to switch to Saisons early this year.
Speaking of recycling, the warmed water goes on the garden and the used grains &b hops go in the compost bin
Hmm - grain, hops and a collection of miscellaneous vegetable matter. I could chuck some yeast in and make a beer out of that....
This worked well, although grinding 4 1/2kg of barley in the middle of the day was hard, hot work. Next time I'll do it the evening before!
I also ground the barley to a much finer level this time, which should enhance the yield of sugars that I can extract out of it with my 'brew in a bag' style method.
I hit my first hurdle after bringing the water to temperature - when I poured the grain into the stock pot / brew kettle it didn't slide into the water in the way that it usually does - the finer grind meant that it sat on top of the water and formed little clumped islands. I needed a lot more and more vigorous stirring to break the lumps up and get the grain into the pot, and that lead to a bit of messy overflow. Next time I'll take more water out of the pot, and add it in afterwards.
Apart from that the mash, sparge & boil went as normal. I used 4 1/2kg of Marris Otter and 1kg of wheat with a 90 minute mash and then dunk sparged twice, as before. This will be an IPA so I used 80g of Fuggles at the start of the boil and 120g of East Kent Goldings with 5 minutes to go, and I added in a kilo of jaggery with 30 minutes to go. Jaggery is a Sri Lankan palm sugar with a rich caramel flavour, and to enhance the maple notes I also used a couple of teaspoons of fenugreek seeds. The use of 'adjuncts' like sugars & herbs to change the flavour profile and to boost the sugars is a little contentious in brewing, but as you may have guessed I don't really care about the Reinheitsgebot.
After the boil was done I let the beer cool in a waterbath in the laundry sink overnight. Then I transferred it to the fermenter - normally I scoop the wort out of the pot by hand and pour it through a sieve to catch the hop pellets, but this time I tried re-using the brew bag in the fermenter as a kind of filter. It was a lot quicker to pour the wort directly in, but then I needed to hoist the bag out and let it drain off. So the overall time saving turned out to be minimal.
Admittedly that may be due to the ridiculous amount of hops I'm using!
The other mistake I made was not boiling all of my sparged wort the day before. Remember I'm dunking my 'used' bag of grain into water in order to extract the most sugars out of it, and then using that slightly sugary water to add to my fermenter to minimise the dilution of the beer. That sparge water needs to be bought to the boil to sterilise it before it's added to the beer, and then cooled back down to room temperature again. I'd used up all my big pots on the main boil so had to do this the following day, which added a lot to the 'faff factor' and tied up the laundry sink for another half a day - I think next time I'll invest in a 25l 'beer cube' (essentially a large plastic container) and use that to hold both the hot main wort and the sparge water overnight. That'll save on water and will also free up a pot.
The other problem I have is the heat - we're in the middle of a Spring heatwave at the minute and the temperature of the laundry is reaching 30 degrees during the day. This is too high for the yeast I'm using so I'm resorting to iced waterbaths and evaporative cooling by soaking an old hoody in water. That hoody kept me warm on any number of camping trips - it's huge so fits over anything else I'm wearing - and it's funny to think of it keeping beer cool now. Not sure how effective it is, I may need to switch to Saisons early this year.
Speaking of recycling, the warmed water goes on the garden and the used grains &b hops go in the compost bin
Hmm - grain, hops and a collection of miscellaneous vegetable matter. I could chuck some yeast in and make a beer out of that....
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