all finished for a couple of weeks

Pretty uneventful brew day today... no broken kettles and pretty close to temperatures mist of the day (the digital thermometer definitely helped)

All grain number 2 put away to ferment... cleaning can wait until tomorrow.

Think its time to sample one of the first all grain now.

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sparging sugary goodness from the grain

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water

Now have everything needed for a brew day

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lots of hops and grain - recent shopping list

10kg Maris otter
1kg crystal
500g biscuit
100g hallertau
100g saaz
100g challenger
100g willamette
100g northdown
100g cascade
S-33 yeast
S-04 yeast
Nottingham ale yeast
Burton water crystals
Raspberry extract

And some left over glacier and hallertau hops

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All Bottled Up

The first all grain is now all bottled up and ready for conditioning.

I'm going to wait a little while before giving the beer a name. If it's a winner then I'll probably name it "Suffolk Stock" as it will be the base which is adapted to make other brews from. 

Already have started buying ingredients to try a Bass Clone next, the price at Worcester Hop Shop is pretty impressive.... now have a stock of challenger, cascade and northdown hops (as well as Glacier and Hallertau left over in the freezer).

Waiting for boil to get going.

Ended up with more wort than expected, was expecting 14L but ended up with more than 20L.

Gravity of the wort before boil was 1.039, about 8 points lower than expected, but given the extra liquor it probably turned out to be a 70% efficiency. in went the packet of spray malt I'd bought just in case.

A quick play with beer smith  suggests I'll still be on for a 4% job.

And something that I forget in a bid to stop dribbles out the fermentation bucket taps is that vaseline melts at ~70degC

Biggest lesson has to be keep the sparge water slower (tie a knot in the syphon tube input) and only open the tap at the bottom of the bucket half way. Thankfully I spotted that I'd need the 5 gallon fermentation bin as the outer bin not the 3 gallon (that could have been messy)

high-level design for my first ever all-grain brew.