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.

American Amber Ale On New Brewery

I visited the Bright Brewery at Christmas. I tried quite a few of their beers but for me the 'Hellfire Amber Ale' stood out. It has a magnificent malty backbone with just a little spicy hop character over the top. From the notes I read at the brewery it's fermented with 'Yorkshire Ale Yeast' and finished with English hops - I assume this means WY1469 and EKGs.

Anyhow, this got me thinking about brewing something along the same lines, but with a bit of American hop character, just because I'm in the mood for some C hops. I've turned to my trusty copy of 'Brewing Classic Styles' and pulled out the American Amber Ale recipe from that.

 I've been busy building myself a new brew rig over the last few months. To begin with I've built up the stand with a mounting point for my chiller, burner and HEX, which already represents a huge improvement over the improvised mountings on my old rig. Also I've put this on castors, which I can tell you already is by far the biggest improvement over the old rig. Here's what it looked like last week before getting tested over the weekend.

The New Rig

For the first brew (and probably the second) on this rig I'm using BIAB with HERMS similar to the previous system. One change on the new rig is a plumbed whirlpool fitting. Eventually this will morph into a full 3V HERMS system, but it might take me a month or more to get fully there.

Another change is that I've now started buying ingredients in bulk. I've gotten myself a monster mill and 75Kgs of base malt, as well as a few kilos of hops. These are being stored appropriately and already I'm enjoying the feeling of being able to brew whenever I want, whatever I want.

For this brew I set the mill gap to ~1mm. My efficiency ended up at 69%, and this was something I was able to measure accurately for once, as I've calibrated the new keggle. I'll adjust the mill gap down a little to try and get to about 75% which is I think a good place to be efficiency wise.

Mash schedule was: Mash in at 55, raise to 66 for 50 mins, 72 for 20 mins, then mash out at 78 for 20mins. I'm testing out some theories I've read on head retention and low mash in temps. I'll report on this later on.

I was left with 2.5l of wort/trub in the keggle at the end of the brew and I should be able to get this down a little more with some adjustment. I got 20L into the fermenter (also a new SS brew bucket), and this got 60 secs of O2 aeration at pitching time. Yeast was WLP001 from a 1.5L stirred starter.

Recipe:

Water: 2tsp Gypsum, 1tsp CaCl2, 1tsp MgSO4 into 32L very soft Melbourne water.

4.19Kg Barrett Burston Ale Malt
0.45Kg Weyermann Munich Malt
0.34Kg Simpsons Crystal Light
0.23Kg Simpsons Cyrstal Dark
0.23Kg Breiss Victory Malt

Pre-boil: 26L at 1.043

After-boil: 22.5 at 1.051

Hops:

24g Centennial  9.0%AA at 60 mins
 7g  Centennial  9.0%AA at 10 mins
 7g  Cascade     7.9%AA at 10 mins
 7g  Centennial  9.0%AA at  0 mins
 7g  Cascade     7.9%AA at   0 mins 

Whirlpool through chiller from 5 mins before end boil to 5 mins post boil. Chilled to ~75C via whirlpool then to 25C into fermenter. Chilled to 21 in fridge before pitching. Fermentation set at 20C

OG: 1.051