Probably Due To Network Congestion

Is it cos I is Black – A Black IPA to be served from Cask at the forthcoming NCB Competition meet at Saltaire Brewery. Ali-G reference 🙂 init!  This wall be heavily dry hopped in two stages, first in the FV with Pellet hops, and secondly in the cask with whole hop cones.
I’m managing to use up a few bag ends too, Flaked Wheat, Munich Malt, NZ Cascade & Motueka 🙂

Fermentables:
Pale Malt – 70.7%
Flaked Wheat – 8.7%
Munich Malt – 7.9%
Carapils (Weyermann) – 5.9%
Carafa Special III – 2.4%
Black Malt – 2.4%
Cara Aroma (Weyermann) – 1.9%

Hops:
Magnum – 14.5 % @ 60 mins – 20g – First Wort Hop
Columbus (Tomahawk) – 16 % @ 60 mins – 20g – First Wort Hop
Simcoe – 12.2 % @ 0 mins – 30g – 80c Steep
Chinook – 11.5 % @ 0 mins – 20g – 80c Steep
Nelson Sauvin – 13.0 % @ 0 mins – 20g – 80c Steep
Citra – 13.8 % @ 0 mins – 30g – 80c Steep
Summit – 14.3 % @ 0 mins – 30g – 80c Steep
Motueka (B Saaz) – 13.8 % @ 0 mins – 13g – 80c Steep
NZ Cascade – 10.2 % @ 0 mins – 11g – 80c Steep

Final Volume: 23 Litres
Original Gravity: 1.055
Final Gravity: 1.015
Alcohol Content: 5.2% ABV
Total Liquor: 34 Litres
Mash Liquor: 13.8 Litres
Mash Efficiency: 75 %
Bitterness: 60 EBU
Colour: 129 EBC
Yeast: Safale us-05
Mash for 90mins, Boil for 60mins
Liquor Treatment: General Purpose with the Graham Wheeler Calculator

Malts, malt temp & Salt additions:

Recirculating the first 4-5 litres, first Wort hops in the copper:

154g of 80c steep hops:

Should have been 1055, I got 1050, will do for me:

Pump Clip Design:

Mash efficiency was 83%, I added an extra litre in the sparge to compensate for extra hop-losses in the copper.
Another easy brewday followed by some messing around in Photoshop 🙂
I’ll update this post when I settle on which Dry Hops I’m going to use.

*4th March ’12 – Dry Hopped in FV with 20g of each of the following Pellets; Summit, Nelson Sauvin, Chinook & Cascade. Further whole hop dry-hopping in cask in about a weeks time.

*9th Mar ’12 – Racked this to cask and dry hopped with a further 25g Nelson Sauvin & 38g Simcoe (last of two bags), Allkleer Finings & 25g priming sugar used.
Bit of an pain having a homebrew FV fully dry hopped with Pellets, my Tea-ball syphon worked pretty well until the last couple of litres (critical litres to fill the cask) when it turned into a furry-pellet-blob and stopped flowing, the last little bit I had to jug a little murky beer into the cask.
So that is a Note-to-Self, don’t fully dry-hop the FV with pellets! I feel a mix of pellets & flowers would have not blocked up and a fully dry-hopped FV with flowers has no trouble at all syphoning.
I’d expect that if I had a chill-able Conical FV I could avoid most of this and draw-off the beer above the pellet sludge of rack-off the pellet debris first a day or so earlier.

*31st Mar ’12 – The first cask ale to run-off at the Northern Craft Brewers English IPA Competition at Saltaire Brewery