General notes from brew session on Saturday 15th November 2014:<\/p>\n
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.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
<\/p>\n
Prep\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n
Water treated with crushed Campden tablet<\/p>\n
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..<\/p>\n
Mash<\/strong><\/p>\n
BeerSmith said to add 14l of water to mash.\u00a0 <\/span>This created a wetter mash than I was used to, but seemed to work OK (based on gravity reading of wort).<\/p>\n
Temperature was incorrect – need to check notes from other brews and adjust BeerSmith settings to suit.\u00a0 <\/span>Likely because boiler was not turned off early enough so liquor did get up to 79C at one point.<\/p>\n
Added some cold water to bring down to 68C<\/p>\n
Sparge<\/strong><\/p>\n
Single handed for the sparge \/ etc… but got good balance between in and out flows.<\/p>\n
Continued to sparge until had 27 litres which all fitted into the boiler.<\/p>\n
Preboil OG reading – 1.037<\/p>\n
Boil<\/strong><\/p>\n
Boil went well with good hot break.<\/p>\n
Some slight spitting<\/p>\n
Overall liquid loss not too bad<\/p>\n
Cooling<\/strong><\/p>\n
Cooling still taking too long.\u00a0 <\/span>New chiller on Christmas list!<\/p>\n
Fixing chiller attachment to tap is still troublesome.<\/p>\n
Also thermometer seeems to stick at around 30C mark – when I think it is actually cooler than that<\/p>\n
Transferred to fermenter but struggled to get 23l out.<\/p>\n
The hop bed didn’t seem as well formed as previously so smaller particles blocked the filter easily.<\/p>\n
Got as close as I could then topped up for final 3l or so.<\/p>\n
OG reading at this stage – 1.042 (against target of 1.043)<\/p>\n
Primary Fermentation<\/strong><\/p>\n
The yeast had a 43% viability rating.\u00a0 <\/span>Smacking the pack had not created the normal inflation – even with a bit of airing cupboard action.\u00a0 <\/span>Pitched it anyway and then ordered another pack just in case.\u00a0 <\/span>As it turned out fermentation started within 24 hours – phew.<\/p>\n
Will wait for primary fermentation to stop then add remaining hops (dry hopping).\u00a0 <\/span>Haven’t done this before and no guidance in the instructions on how long to do this for.\u00a0 <\/span>I assume as long as the secondary fermentation (maybe 10 days at 12C?).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
General notes from brew session on Saturday 15th November 2014: From the many entries submitted for the 2013 Great British<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":99,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[10],"class_list":["post-95","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-brewing","tag-allgrain"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/areeves.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/95","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/areeves.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/areeves.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/areeves.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/areeves.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=95"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/areeves.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/95\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/areeves.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/99"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/areeves.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=95"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/areeves.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=95"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/areeves.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=95"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}