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)

Beamish clone reflections

First let's recap what was different about this compared to the last Beamish clone I tried:

1. I used Simpsons Maris Otter as the base malt instead of Crisp Ale malt
2. I used Pacman yeast instead of US-05
3. I added a level teaspoon of sodium bicarbonate to the water treatment
4. I served it on my new handpump

And the reasons:

1. My LHBS didn't have Crisp Ale, and I use Simpsons Maris Otter for most ales, so thought I would stick with it.
2. I had wanted to use Pacman the first time round, but couldn't get my hands on it.
3. I did notice a slightly unpleasant acidity at low temperatures with the previous version, and some reading up on water treatment told me that carbonates can help to cover this up when using lots of dark malts/roasted barley.
4. I didn't have a handpump the first time round.

I've been lucky with this recipe, it was given to me by Will from perfectpint.blogspot.com, and he had obviously put a bit of time and effort into it's creation. The first version was excellent, but had a little room for improvement. This version is an improvement on it. I think that each of the four changes I made had a detectable impact on the final product.

The Maris Otter gave it's usual biscuity background. I thought this might get lost among the chocolate and roasty notes, but it's definitely there. The Pacman yeast has contributed an amazing mouthfeel to the beer, and is probably the single biggest improvement. There's a slight but restrained fruity note too, which is probably coming from the yeast.

I couldn't detect any unpleasant acidic flavours, and my mash ph was spot on, so I have to conclude that it was worth adding the sodium bicarbonate - certainly it did no harm.

Finally the handpump adds a bit of magic as well as increased body and mouthfeel to the beer. I didn't 'cask condition' this as such. I just carbonated it to about 1.5vols of CO2, and then pulled it through the line, giving a small amount of CO2 whenever it was needed. The results were really satisfying.

What I have ended up with is a relatively low alcohol session beer, with loads of flavour from the chocolate malt and roasted barley, a pleasant and assertive bitterness, and incredible body and mouthfeel. It's not a dead on clone, but rather a reimagining of Beamish as a sort of premium stout - the stout equivalent of a Best Bitter perhaps.

Needless to say, I'll be brewing this again, and soon. 

The Path Is Clear

A few months back I mentioned that I was planning to start brewing lager. Even though I still haven't gotten around to doing it, the decision to start has actually been quite beneficial to my brewing knowledge. It has resulted in some experimentation which has greatly increased my knowledge of the finer points of the brewing process. The main aspects of brewing I have been studying up on recently are water chemistry and mash ph, which are of course very closely linked. My main sources of knowledge have been the braukeiser wiki and the "Key Concepts in Water Treatment" document by Tony Wheeler, available from here. I also purchased a Hanna pH meter, and have learned to calibrate it correctly (it helps that I work with lab people). Here are some key concepts i have come to terms with (all based on Melbourne water supply - largely lacking in all ions important to brewing, with addition of about 75ppm Calcium plus some other ions):

1. Mash pH varies quite considerably with grist composition - darker grists produce lower ph mashes
2.  Very light grists produce mashes with pH (far?) above the desirable range of 5.2-5.4 (My recent Kolsch)
3.  Average grists producing copper coloured mashes just about hit the pH 5.4 mark. (My recent APA)
4.  Not adding gypsum as part of calcuim addition negatively affects hop character in medium to highly hopped beers. (Harsh hop character in my Brakspear Special with no gypsum addition, did not seem to affect hop character of my Rebel Rising Red, which had moderate hop levels and also received no gypsum)

Extrapolating from 2&3 above, it's possible that very dark grists may cause the pH to drop below 5.2. Wheeler claims it's better to be too low than too high, so we'll have to wait and see if this is an issue or not. I've got a Beamish clone coming up soon that will test this out.

Based on these findings, this is what I aim to change from now on.

1.  Measure pH with well calibrated meter FOR ALL BREWS.
2.  Add lactic acid to mash water for lighter coloured grists to get pH level in desirable range.
3.  Add gypsum to bring SO4 ion level into the 100-150ppm range for all hoppy beers. I just did this with my American Pale Ale and I'm keen to see how it affects the hop character. I may push even higher for the sake of experiment later on.

I should explain that I have always treated my water with about 1.5tsp of Calcium Chloride and 1tsp gypsum, but never really tried to understand why I should do this. I had a vague (and correct) idea that I definitely needed to add Calcium to my water, but didn't know any more than that. In the end I convinced myself that gypsum probably wasn't that important, but the first hoppy beer of my production line where it wasn't used had a very noticeable harsh hop character. Perhaps from something else, but I will experiment to see if it is from lack of gypsum.