Wednesday, February 11, 2015

My Continuing Landlord Obsession

So here we go again, Wyeast Yorkshire Ale yeast, Styrian Goldings, Golden Promise, and just a hint of Simpsons Heritage Crystal.

Looks like Timothy Taylor have done quite a bit of updating of their website recently. There are some really good videos with head brewer Peter Eells narrating here.

I particularly like the fermenting vessels - basically they convert from open to closed after the main part of fermentation is finished.

Mmmmmmmm


Recipe:

4.20  Kg Thomas Fawcell Floor Malted Golden Promise
0.175Kg Simpsons Heritage Crystal

34g Fuggles 5% @ 60
23g EKG 5.7%   @15
50g Styrian Goldings 2.5% @ 0

Salts: 1tsp CaCls, 1.5tsp CaSO4, 1tsp MgSO4 (also 1/4 tsp of Lactic)

Mash: In at 55C for 5, 66C for 40, 72C for 10, 78C for 10

Mashing in at 55 seems to have had a dramatic effect on the Amber Ale I brewed last time - hydrometer samples maintained a dense fluffy head for about an hour!

The new system build is still ongoing, and my lack of familiarity with it caused a big cock up last night. I mashed into about 36L of liquor instead of 32. I don't have numbers on the keggle, just marks and I got mixed up. That will need to be fixed.
Mid-mash
This meant that nearly an hour into what became a 2 hour boil I still had over 30L of weak wort and I decided that it was getting too late to do a very extended boil so I chucked in the bittering hops. One hour later I still had around 27L of wort, which is usually my pre-boil volume. At that stage I cut the heat, whirlpooled and added the styrians, and finished with an OG of 1.040. This means efficiency was at around 80%, without changing the crush, which shows you how much more efficient lower gravity brewing is in a brew in a bag system.

I ended up collecting about 23L of wort and could have collected a lot more, but I didn't have the headspace in my fermenter (a Brewtech stainless bucket). I'm planning to aggressively top crop this batch, at 24 hours skim off and throw away, then at 48hr collect a batch of yeast for another brew. For now it just has a cling film lid, which will be replaced when activity reduces a little with the usual stainless lid.

I chilled to groundwater temp (25C), and pitched and aerated straight away as it was getting too late for messing about. Yeast is of course WY1469, and aeration was 60sec O2. The fermenting fridge was set to 17C and I'm allowing it to free rise to 19.


Target OG was 1.045, and this will also affect the IBUs on this beer. Wheeler lists Landlord OG as 1.042, so I'm there or thereabouts. Overall it was only a minor disaster, caused by two factors; night time brewing and lack of keggle number markings/familiarity with the system. On the plus side the extended boil does seem to have darkened the wort a little, which is appropriate for a Landlord clone.

This should still be a decent beer, and I'll put it 'on cask' (Low CO2 through hand pump, ~10C).

Lessons learned: Sort out the keggle markings, no more night time brewing until I've got the system dialled in.

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