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Archive for December 2010

Building a 45 Litre Igloo Mash Tun

Each piece of the soldered manifold is made from 22mm copper pipe with un-soldered joints to allow disassembly and cleaning with a ‘cask tap cleaning brush’, the underside 1/3-1/2 of the copper tube is slotted with a 1mm Angle grinder disk.
The hole in the coolbox was made with a 21mm Q-max cutter, the tank connector was drilled out with a 15mm Blacksmiths drill (this would have been a lot easier with a Pillar drill and a Vice, but all I have is a crappy woodworking vice clamped to a wobbly table and a Cordless drill!)

Tools used were:
Pipe cutter
Solder, Flux, and Blow lamp
Round file
Flat file
Angle Grinder with 1mm Cutting disks
Scotch Brite pad
21mm Q-max cutter, with 8mm pilot drill
15mm Blacksmith’s drill
Cordless Drill / driver

Parts used were:
45litre Igloo coolbox
22mm Copper pipe
15mm copper pipe
6-off 22mm Equal Elbows
4-off 22mm Equal Tees
1-off 15x22x22mm Un-equal Tee
15mm Brass compression tank connector
15mm Brass Ball Valve

The Igloo coolbox which came from an ebay seller:
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Some of the manifold pieces cut and arranged:
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Soldered and separated:
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Soldered and attached:
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15mm Ball Valve tap fitted approx 11mm up from the inside base of the coolbox:
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Cleaned manifold:
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I found while fitting everything together that the Elbows were a bit more acute than 90 degrees which made it look all out of parallel, I fixed this by soldering it up with the removable end pieces on.
Everything was filled clean of burrs inside and out, excess solder removed, then scotch-brite pad used to polish up the copper. A thorough clean with a mild soda crystal solution gave it a final internal clean out. I later added a short bent turn-down spout from the ball valve with a 8mm reducer soldered to it.

This is an attempt at Brewdog’s Trashy Blonde and the recipe started life as Sara Carter’s (Scarer) www.brewdog.com/trashy_blonde
This will be my first experience of Pellet hops with the Motueka, I’m going to ferment it with Safale us-05 and Mashing at 68c (though I aimed for 69c, even after a pre-heat, empty and refill of the Mash tun I still lost almost 5c from 83c in the HLT), Mash for a minimum of 60mins.
I may dry hop this with 13g of Ahtanum in the fermenter… to be decided.

Trashy Blonde

Fermentables:
Pale Malt - 70%
Caramalt - 10%
Munich Malt - 10%
Wheat Malt - 10%

Hops:
Ahtanum Whole @ 60 mins - 8g (FWH)
Motueka (B Saaz) Pellet @ 60 mins - 8g (FWH)
Simcoe Whole @ 60 mins - 8g (FWH)
Motueka (B Saaz) Pellet 6.8 % 10 mins - 22g
Simcoe Whole @ 10 mins - 23g
Ahtanum Whole @ 10 mins - 22g
Simcoe Whole @ 0 mins - 16g (80c Steep for 20-30mins)
Ahtanum Whole @ 0 mins - 16g (80c Steep for 20-30mins)
Motueka (B Saaz) Pellet @ 0 mins - 16g (80c Steep for 20-30mins)

Final Volume: 23 Litres
Original Gravity: 1.041
Final Gravity: 1.010
Alcohol Content: 4% ABV
Total Liquor: 32.3 Litres
Mash Liquor: 9.5 Litres
Mash Efficiency: 80 %
Bitterness: 44 EBU
Colour: 11 EBC

The Malts and liquor treatment salts:
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Mash Tun wrapped up:
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Todays Kiwi & Yank hops:
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Leaf and pellet hops:
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80c Steep hops going in:
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Running to fermenter, the clearest wort I’ve made for a long while, the break material just dropped like a stone:
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Looks like about 1040, Refractometer said 11.75 Brix which is about 1045 bit high but I’m not going to worry about it:
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I’ll clean the copper tomorrow, there’s beer to be drunk….

After 7 days in the Fermenter I dry hopped this with:
15g Ahtanum
10g Motueka (Pellets)
10g Simcoe

*Bottled 10th Jan ’11 with 65g sugar

Liquorice & Treacle Stout – I’ve been thinking about both liquorice and treacle in a stout for a while. This is going to be V.1 (proceed with caution) and next weekend I will do a V.2 (less cautious) with a lot more Treacle in it, somewhere between 2-5% of the malt bill.

Fermentables:
Pale Malt - 1990g - 70.3%
Flaked Barley - 280g - 10%
Caramalt - 280g - 10%
Roasted Barley - 125g - 4.5%
Chocolate Malt - 125g - 4.5%
Sugar, Black Treacle - 21g – 0.7%

Hops:
Centennial @ 60 mins - 17g
Centennial @ 5 mins - 9g

Copper Additions:
Liquorice Powder @ 5mins – 10.4g
Protafloc Tablet @ 15-20mins – Half a Tablet

Final Volume: 12 Litres
Original Gravity: 1.055
Final Gravity: 1.016
Alcohol Content: 5% ABV
Total Liquor: 19 Litres
Mash Liquor: 7 Litres
Mash Efficiency: 80 %
Bitterness: 37 EBU
Colour: 235 EBC

Water treatment to the Stout Profile in the GW Calc, added to the Malts and blended / Mashing in.
Mash for 90mins and Boil for 60mins.
Yeast probably just Safale S-04.

The malts, pale malt; caramalt; roasted barley; chocolate malt; flaked barley:
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Mini Mash Tun in use for the first time in ages, it just manages this brew length:
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Treacle weighed out:
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Liquorice Powder weighed out:
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First batch sparge:
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In go the Bittering hops, Centennial:
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its 1054/55, so near as damn it on the money:
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I cooled a bit far, oops, popped it by the radiator in the Kitchen to warm up:
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Kind of a drawn out brewday as I was finishing off the 50L brewery I was making.

*Bottled 15th Dec ’10 with 30g White Sugar, tasting plenty liquorice and hints of the Treacle still in there :)


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