Sunday, January 24, 2010

The latest brew (mellow lemon) had lemongrass added during the steep and boil, but that samples over the last 3 days didn't have any real of lemon. So decided to experiment:
Added 50ml of fresh lemon juice along with 350ml of water and 80g of sugar to make the priming solution. While sterilising the priming solution (by boiling) some zest was also added in a sieve.
This brew was lightly hopped (40 IBU)

- 3 litres of the brew went into bottles
- the rest went into the keg along with "Hop Monster".

"10.6L of Mellow Lemon" + "7.5L of Hop Monster" = 18L of "Bitter Top"

Also put more effort into bottle labels.



Monday, January 18, 2010

Not the best time to start a brew, but a mini brew is on to the go to blend with the "hop monster"

The brewlog for "hop monster"

Sunday, January 17, 2010

Decided to name the latest brew "Hop Monster":-
The brew has been split into 20 bottles and 7.5 litres in the keg.

The plan is to make a brew light on hops tomorrow... that will be added to the keg. If the simple maths works then that should get:
 56.1 IBU  =  ( (7.5L * 78.2 IBU) + (9L * 37.8 IBU) ) / 16.5 IBU

Monday, January 11, 2010

this time boiling the full volume rather than topping up with cold water (last time was 5L boil and 12L into the FV) turned into an adventure.

I had new toys:-
15L+20L stainless steel stock pots (from ebay)
home-made immersion chiller

All went smoothly until pulling the immersion chiller out of the stock pot covered in hops. I'm not sure why I didn't figure that one out when planning :-(
Got the worst off, then found the muslin bags didn't quite fit over the fermentation bin (and I didn't have 3 hands to hold things in place).

In hindsight I should have nipped to Tesco and got a really big sieve, instead I decided to pout into the FV to filter out the hops... but I'd forgot to put the plastic on the back of the tap so the tap got clogged. Before long the arm was washed in anti-bacterial cleaner and in the fermentation bin undoing the tap :-( and then getting wort over the floor :-( I suppose the good news is fermentation seems underway.



The other mistake, is I doubled the hops used last time the hop s up based on final volume (I2L -> 22L). Looking at Beersmith afterwards I have 78.2 IBU... so higher than Punk IPA but nowhere near Hardcore IPA. The wort sample was pretty vile.
The hops: 50g Northern Brewer at 60 mins, 40g Cascade at 30 mins, 40g Cascade at 15 mins.
The other stuff: 2.5Kg of spraymalt, 600g crystal (steeped for 30 min before boiling) and Safale-S04

Sunday, January 10, 2010

Brew day has started!


(adding some images for the new style sheet)

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