Brewing Notes: ROC Fall

General notes from brew session on Saturday 15th November 2014:

From the many entries submitted for the 2013 Great British Home Brew competition and after judging by some of the UK’s leading beer experts, Tom Wrights’ “ROC-Fall” 4.2% Premium Bitter was judged a worthy winner for brewing at Thornbridge and being available nationally through Nicholson’s pubs.

Prep 

Water treated with crushed Campden tablet

Plugged the recipe into BeerSmith2 – first time I’ve used the software for an actual brew but have been playing around with it for a while to get used to the interface / settings etc..

Mash

BeerSmith said to add 14l of water to mash.  This created a wetter mash than I was used to, but seemed to work OK (based on gravity reading of wort).

Temperature was incorrect – need to check notes from other brews and adjust BeerSmith settings to suit.  Likely because boiler was not turned off early enough so liquor did get up to 79C at one point.

Added some cold water to bring down to 68C

Sparge

Single handed for the sparge / etc… but got good balance between in and out flows.

Continued to sparge until had 27 litres which all fitted into the boiler.

Preboil OG reading – 1.037

Boil

Boil went well with good hot break.

Some slight spitting

Overall liquid loss not too bad

Cooling

Cooling still taking too long.  New chiller on Christmas list!

Fixing chiller attachment to tap is still troublesome.

Also thermometer seeems to stick at around 30C mark – when I think it is actually cooler than that

Transferred to fermenter but struggled to get 23l out.

The hop bed didn’t seem as well formed as previously so smaller particles blocked the filter easily.

Got as close as I could then topped up for final 3l or so.

OG reading at this stage – 1.042 (against target of 1.043)

Primary Fermentation

The yeast had a 43% viability rating.  Smacking the pack had not created the normal inflation – even with a bit of airing cupboard action.  Pitched it anyway and then ordered another pack just in case.  As it turned out fermentation started within 24 hours – phew.

Will wait for primary fermentation to stop then add remaining hops (dry hopping).  Haven’t done this before and no guidance in the instructions on how long to do this for.  I assume as long as the secondary fermentation (maybe 10 days at 12C?).