Probably Due To Network Congestion

Pioneer’s Gold – A Barley wine for the National Homebrew Competition (or maybe the Year after) and using fresh live yeast from work. I’ve been meaning to try this for a while and after seeing Graeme Coates’ brewday I thought I’d go for it. I’ve gone for 15 litres as i don’t think its something I’ll drink very fast and its nicely left room in the copper for an extra 10L sparge to extract more from the mash. Hopping is some Pioneer pellets and older First Gold that were in the Hop-Freezer.

Fermentables:
Pale Malt – 90%
Wheat Malt – 5%
Caramalt – 4%
Amber Malt – 1%

Hops:
First Gold Whole 7.9 % @ 60 mins – 25g (after a long boil down first)
Pioneer Pellet 9.5 % @ 60 mins – 17g
First Gold Whole 7.9 % @ 10 mins – 17g
Pioneer Pellet 9.5 % @ 10 mins – 17g
First Gold Whole 7.9 % @ 0 mins – 39g
Pioneer Pellet 9.5 % @ 0 mins – 56g (What was left in the bag)
Golding Whole 5.1 % @ 0 mins – 3g (I ran out of First Gold so made a small extra addition)

Final Volume: 15 Litres
Original Gravity: 1.100
Final Gravity: 1.024
Alcohol Content: 10.1% ABV
Total Liquor: 26.7 Litres
Mash Liquor: 17.2 Litres
Mash Efficiency: 70 %
Bitterness: 73 EBU (The First Gold are pretty old now so i don’t expect to make this figure)
Colour: 22 EBC
Yeast: Thick skimmed yeast from Saltaire Brewery, fresh as you like.
Mash: 3 hours at 65°c, aimed for 66°c.

Liquor Treatment salts,  shown here is the Calcium Chloride with Magnesium Sulphate on top:

Malts, Temp & Gypsum (Calcium Sulphate):

I went back to my old HTC Android for Strike Temp & Batch sparge volumes, this is even though I just got Beer Alchemy on the iPhone:

Pretty full, but I’m sure I could get a fair bit more in sometime:

First runnings, I recycled about 12 litres:

From the first sparge I collected 20 Litres @ 17.4 Brix so did an extra 10 Litre sparge and got 32 Litres @ 13.8 Brix, just over 64% Mash efficiency on the First sparge which I am quite happy with:

The first sparge was added kind of on the fly, then the extra 10 L sparge was added via my beta-version spinning sparge arm and the solar pump:

On the boil, I had to simmer for a while until I could turn up the heat:

Boiled off about 12-13 litres before adding the first hops, 3 hours 20 mins total boil time!:

Pioneer Pellets & First Gold hops:

I didn’t realise at this point but I think my refreactometer may have been exaggerating a bit:

Steep hops in for 30mins at Flameout:

I ended up collecting about 18 litres after doing some liquoring back towards the end of the boil (Thanks Refractometer, I should have stuck with my instincts as I would have been right!) did some small sugar additions to rescue a few OG points ended up with 1091. I pitched 100g of fresh, thick live yeast from work, MrMalty said 80-100ml, yeast pitched at 17°c:

A fairly relaxed day, second breakfast, drop the Mrs off at the train station, and walked the dogs while the mash was on, left the copper cleaning until the day after. Fermenter in the fridge set at 18°c for the first 24 hours then will hold at 20°c for a day or two before letting it free rise to 24°c, if its anything like at work this yeast will need a bit of TLC with a rouse every now and then.

This was my first Brewday taking all the photos on the iPhone, cracking photo quality and much easier than using the Canon DSLR, I use Instagram without any filters which kept everything in the nice square-blog-able format 🙂

*1st May ’12 – gravity at 1041 @ about 20°c, tasting very fruity almost like US hops!

*3rd May ’12 – Gravity 1027 @ 22°c tonight, not far from 1024 predicted FG, given it a good rouse… still tasting pretty sweet, hope some of this will dry out a bit.

*8th May ’12 – Down to 1015 @ 22°c I’m hoping its going to stop soon, it was 1016 yesterday so its getting close.

*9th May ’12 – Steady at 1015 now, chilling in stages probably 17°c then down to 11°c before bottling.

*12th May ’12 – Bottled with 90g White Sugar, got 45ish 330ml-ish bottles, the waiting game begins…..

*10th Sep ’12 – Tasting rather good, a nice malty toffee mouthful with warm lingering alcohol, a sweet lemoniness is also apparent.