Probably Due To Network Congestion

Imperial Smoked Porter – This is serving a couple of purposes; First is a Trial run of a big beer in my newly finished False bottom Mash tun; Second is using up some odd bags of malt and some older hops I had in the freezer and some other part bags of hops.
I’m not expecting the stated bitterness from my hops – http://www.wellhopped.co.uk/Product.htm so I’m going semi-worst case scenario and adjusting AA for age and storage.

Fermentables:
Pale Malt – 70.2%
Caramalt – 8.2%
Peat Smoked Malt, medium – 4.2%
Amber Malt – 3.9%
Oat Malt – 3.5%
Chocolate Malt, Pale – 2.3%
Crystal Wheat Malt – 2.4%
Chocolate Wheat Malt – 1.8%
Flaked Wheat – 1.6%
Chocolate Malt – 1.5%
Flaked Rye 0 EBC – 0.5%

Hops:
Bobek – 3.7 % @ 75 mins – 124g (FWH)
Admiral – 12 % @ 75 mins – 19g (FWH)
Herkules – 15.8 % @ 75 mins – 35g (FWH)
Brewers Gold – 9.1 % @ 10 mins – 68g
Cascade – 5.5 % @ 0 mins – 29g (Flame-out Steep for 20mins)
Saaz – 3.8 % @ 0 mins – 33g (Flame-out Steep for 20mins)
Simcoe – 12.9 % @ 0 mins – 20g (Flame-out Steep for 20mins)

Final Volume: 23 Litres
Original Gravity: 1.076
Final Gravity: 1.021
Alcohol Content: 7.2% ABV
Total Liquor: 36.8 Litres
Mash Liquor: 20.5 Litres
Mash Efficiency: 70 % (I collected 32L @ 1055 so hit efficiency but had too much liquor)
Bitterness: 121 EBU (I’m not expecting this as the bittering hops were fairly old so subtracting 30% from the AA will be more like 90EBU)
Colour: 140 EBC
Mashed for 90mins @ 66c
Boil for 75mins
Liquor treatment as per GW calc for General Purpose

Bigger bucket than normal with 8.5kg of malts:

New mash tun full of hot liquor:

Initial Mash a little high, cooled with cold liquor to 66c:

Tidy brewsheet (version 3, other two are scibbly works in progress) along with late hops:

Quite a heap of first Wort Hops in the copper along with the common salt addition:

What lies beneath, mash leftovers under the mash screen:

10 min hops going in:

Break material clumping in the copper:

Looks near as damn it to me (Showing 72 +2 divisions in the meniscus = 1076), not bad for a first outing of the new Mash Tun:

I had 3.7 Litres in the new mash tun to just cover the false bottom, the first sparge top-up was a little over 3 litres so I didn’t top-up and subtracted the difference from the Second batch sparge. This was to take into account the liquor under the screen, I ended up with 32 Litres in the copper which i thought too much but by the end of the 75min boil I was at my predicted gravity so I must have worked things out right!

Thoughts on the False bottom:
The mash ran off very well and after a few jugs of recirculating it was also very clear.
After stirring the second sparge and running off I came back to the mash tun to find it had run a load of malt particles into the copper as the last of the mash drained out. I’ll have to keep an eye on it next time to stop this just as it starts to show bits coming through, or have a go a Fly sparging so as to not actually disturb the Mash bed and hopefully limit the amount of malt particles coming through.
New cleaning game, poking bits of malt out of the perforated stainless!

16th May ’11
The usual, Stout+S-04 ferment 🙂 :

*Bottled 25th May ’11 with 71g of White sugar and a tiny sprinkle of Nottingham yeast into each bottle as a bit of a safety precaution as it had dropped very bright. Finished at 1016-1018 so about 7.7% ABV.

*4th JUne ’11 Taster bottle, tasting good the Peat Smoked malt works well with the Strength of this beer, Bitterness just right so I’m glad I adjusted the hop Alpha acids for my older hops.