American Pale Ale

So it's back to brewing classic styles for the first beer through my new mash tun. I've dispensed with the bag for now and I'm close to finishing the 3 vessel system I've been building for the last few months.

Progress

The recipe is one I've done several times before, though I've played with the hops a little. The brewday itself was besieged with issues from the off:

1. I connected my heat exchanger backwards during the initial mash, and the wort ended up hitting 69C through the HEX for a short time before I spotted the error and dropped it back to 66C.
2. I ran my sparge water through the HEX to ensure it was at the correct temperature, but once again I connected it backwards and may possibly have heated some sparge water way above an acceptable temperature, also the water in the HEX boiled for a moment which is not good.
3. I didn't heat enough sparge water and ended up topping up the kettle with around 3.5L of water to hit the pre-boil volume. 
4. My hop filter using a stainless braid got completely clogged with pellet hops and I left around 5L of wort in the kettle at the end of the brewday.
5. Efficiency was poor,  around 63%, a combination of mill gap and running out of sparge water.
6. The final insult - I messed up setting the temperature on the fermenting fridge and 12 hours after pitching the yeast it was sitting at 12.5C.

I'm still hopeful it's not a complete disaster, but I'll be lucky to pull some decent beer from this brewday, and in any event I'll be very short on volume.

One nice result from the whole experience was the clarity of the wort at the end. It's unlike anything I've seen before from any other brew setup I've used. Hopefully it translates into clearer beer, though I'm not so sure about that.

 Anyhow, that's the first and hopefully the most painful brew on the new system. You can plan these systems out all you like but you don't really get an idea how it all works together until you fire it up. I now know where I need to concentrate my efforts to get this running smoothly. I need to:

1. Sort out draining of the kettle to the plate chiller. Some ideas below
2. I need to heat more sparge water than seems necessary, better to have too much rather than too little. I was still getting 1.024 from the last runnings out of the mash tun so missed out on a lot of sugar here.
3. I need to tune the mill gap a little. I had no issues with sparging so there seems to be some room for adjustment.
4. I need rules about HEX connections. It matters which way it's connected.
5. I need to mount the controller properly. At the moment it's just sitting on the edge of the stand.

For the kettle draining, I'm going to have to abandon the sparge braid as a hop filter. It just isn't up to the job and it's also having a dramatic effect on my ability to create a whirlpool in the kettle. Because I'm effectively draining the kettle from the whole of the outer rim, the whirlpool has no chance to gain any momentum.

My plan is to replace the braid with a simple side facing pickup tube and simply depend on an effective whirlpool stage to concentrate hop debris away from the pickup tube. I'll need to throttle back the outlet to avoid upsetting the resulting cone of hop debris. Also this means I can't really use the boiling wort towards the end of the boil to sanitise my chiller, so the chiller will have to be sanitised separately. Maybe I'll figure out a clever way to do this, but I can't think of one right now.

Here's the recipe:

5.1Kg Barrett Burston Ale Malt
0.34Kg Weyermann Munich I
0.34Kg Joe White Wheat
0.23Kg Breiss Victory

Water treatment: 2.5tsp CaSO4, 1tsp CaCl2, 1tsp MgSO4, 0.25tsp lactic acid

18g Magnum 14.7% @60
20g Cascade 7.9% @ 10
20g Centennial 9% @10
20g Cascade 7.9% @ 0
20g Centennial 9% @0

Pitched 200ml slurry of WLP001. Fridge set to 19C (or so I thought, dipped to 12.5C but quickly corrected back to 19)

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

New brewstand

I have finally finished painting my new brew stand. It's a collapsible structure designed for easy storage. I've still got to figure out some way of mounting my new chiller to it. I got this built through a recommendation on http://www.aussiehomebrewer.com. I'm really happy with it as it gives me something to build around, and doesn't take up too much space to keep everyone else happy.