Posts Tagged ‘experiment’
AG#96 – Bravo+Apollo=Citra?
Posted on: March 2, 2013
Bravo+Apollo=Citra? – An experimental brewday with added Brew-Monkey! Its something I heard Stan Hieronymus say on a Brewery Network podcast (1H.27mins in) about the Bravo+Apollo=Citra so thought I’d give it a go, so ordered some Bravo to go with the Apollo I already had. If its any good I’ll maybe enter it into the Northern Craft Brewers & Saltaire Brewery Competition.
Thats experiment No.1, experiment No.2 was for SimpleOne on JBK (@Beehaveeor on Twitter) who wanted 5 beers marking for a hopping experiment he’s conducting, this second experiment also involved Dave @broadfordbrewer who came over to eat our food and drink our beer… and most welcome he was too.
Fermentables:
Lager Malt – 45%
Wheat Malt – 33%
Munich Type I (Weyermann) – 15%
Caramalt – 5%
Cara Munich III (Weyermann) – 2%
Hops:
Magnum – 12.7 % @ 60 mins – 25g (FWH)
Magnum – 12.7 % @ 30 mins – 25g
Bravo – 17.3 % @ 0 mins – 40g (80c Steep for 30mins)
Apollo – 19.5 % @ 0 mins – 40g (80c Steep for 30mins)
Final Volume: 23 Litres
Original Gravity: 1.055
Final Gravity: 1.013
Alcohol Content: 5.5% ABV
Mash Efficiency: 75 %
Bitterness: 55 EBU
Colour: 17 EBC
Yeast: Safale us-05 (I’d actually meant to skim off last weeks brew but totally forgot)
Mash: 60mins minimum, as we had beers to drink!
Liquor treated to Pale Ale via THBF calculator
The Malts:
Dave Mashing in:
The part of the brewday where we had to be diligent:
Running into the copper:
The 80c Steep hops:
The wort was certainly smelling very good, hope the yeast works its magic and makes it taste like Citra, in any case the Bravo hops were smelling good too, though the Apollo just smell like Dank Onions 🙂
Did a 2.5 Litre Liquorback to get OG 1055, so less than 1 Litre short on predicted brew length.
*8th Mar ’13 – Gravity at 1020 and tastes rather nice, its definitely not Citra but its certainly good beer 😉 Might Dry Hop with a few grams of Bravo & Apollo.
*Bottled 16th Mar ’13 – with 110g of white sugar to about 20 Litres, tasting good, pretty Peach / Mellon type Uber-Cascade-Amarillo thing going on.
AG#8 – JBK Anniversary Brew 09
Posted on: October 2, 2009
- In: Brewing
- 4 Comments
The instructions:
Jim wrote:I would look for something around a maximum of 55 OG, with crystal malt to give it body and a bit of darkness from roast barley and good old English hops – plenty of fuggle with a bit of golding for aroma and around 45 to 50 IBUs.
So this is what I’ve come up with:
Fermentables:
Maris Otter 1880g
Dark Crystal Malt 205g (no mention of which crystal, so this gives me a chance to try out some Dark Crystal)
Torrefied Wheat 78g
Roasted Barley 26g
Hops:
Challenger – 60 mins 19g
Progress – 30 mins 16g
First Gold – 5 mins 11g
Final Volume: 12 Litres
Original Gravity: 1.041
Final Gravity: 1.010
Alcohol Content: 3.9% ABV
Bitterness: 48 EBU
Colour: 64 EBC
The Grain weighed out, 2 Tsp of Chalk and Gysum for the Mash:
The Intended Yeast slurry from a previous brew which is coming back to life and releasing some bubbles, will decant off the beer and pitch some of this:
The new manifold in my 15L tun, note the support sleeving to support my warm floppy pipe. I may need to make this a rigid arrangement in future:
Grist Temp:
The Mash Tun:
Mashed in @ 67C, leaving for 90 mins:
Mash pH looks near enough:
Hops, Generous weighing as I know the Burton Ale yeast will subdue them:
End mash temp:
First Runnings being recycles, sparging went brilliantly, no sticking and pretty clear wort:
First Wort Hops going in with first batch spargings:
Leftovers:
Bacon butty:
5 min hops addition with cooler already in:
Sanitising with Starsan:
Pretty clear hitting the FV and a good deep colour:
Pitching Whitelabs Burton Ale yeast Slurry @ 24C:
Well Aerated:
Hops and Trub:
My exceedingly happy brewing cupboard, FV1 is JBK, FV2 is Blauer Vogel, in the back the Top crate is full of TTL, underneath and to the left there is my Otter Dark Stout:
Just a bit of clearing up to do, hit OG1042 @ 24C so that’ll do me 🙂
Happy Anniversary JBK, Live long and prosper and all that 🙂
Hope this will be a good one, I needed a darker ale under my belt 🙂
Bottling Update FG hit 1010/1012 ish
Full Crate:
Sun shining through then bottle, lots of Burton Ale yeast in suspension, should take a few weeks for it to settle out:
2 weeks of warm followed by 2 weeks of cool and these should be ready.
Something for the JBK Anniversary bottles 🙂
Experiment in Wort Cooling
Posted on: June 17, 2009
Thoughts on cooling wort!
You use a 10-15 meter coil to make either a Counterflow cooler(CFC) or a Immersion cooler(IC)….
In the case of the CFC, could you slow down the flow of Hot Wort and speed up the flow of cooling water and thus reduce the length of your copper coil?
I’m just in the making of something that I think will speed up my Boil-to-Pitching temperature time even if it doesn’t entirely chill things down, mainly as an interim measure to either buying or making an IC, but also as a bit of an experiment…
🙂
The unequal T’s are 15x15x22mm from B&Q
The Spiral bit it a bendy tap connector also from B&Q
The Pipe is 22mm and there are a couple of 15mm bits in there too
…the other fittings are from Screwfix and just standard 15mm connectors.
I intend to restrict the flow of the 15mm down to 8 or 10 at the out-end.
Soldering it up, added a 15mm compression nut to attach to boiler and a 15-8mm reducer to restrict the flow.
I’ve ordered some bits, garden hose, Tap connector and hose quick releases.
I’m ready to go… Brewday today 🙂 while we’re off work.
Apparently its almost exactly the design of a piece of Chemistry equipment – Allihn condenser – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Condenser_(laboratory)
🙂
***OK then…
****Well its just been tested!
Left the boiler to settle for 20 mins from boiling, hooked up my bits of copper pipe and garden hose and turned on the cold water.
At a sensible flow rate of wort it was able to cool to 55°C
At a slow trickle I can get it down to 34°C
I ended up with 13 Litres of wort @ 45°C in the FV (with lots of flow rate changes and temperature checks)
If I’d let it trickle it would have taken ages to empty the boiler so it had to sit in the bath cooling off some more.
Here’s the pics:
It does prove that if you were to gang 3 or 4 of these up you could probably get a lower temperature and a faster flow, but that goes against my simplistic idea, I’m now going to go buy a coil of 10mm copper pipe… 10,15,20 metres??? and make a proper IC coil! 🙂
- In: Brewing
- 3 Comments
Geordie lager kit – wheat beer with Saaz hops
Here’s the idea….
Take one cheap ass Geordie Lager Kit, some Wheat Spray Malt, a jar of Golden Syrup, some Saaz hops and Safbrew WB06 wheat yeast… and it makes a Wheat beer of sorts.
I’m going to do the following:
- Boil up the Wheat Spray malt and 15g Saaz hops for 40 mins
- Maybe add 5g Saaz hops for the last 10 mins of boil
- Add 5g Saaz hops at flame-out for a 5 minute steep
- Tip the warmed Kit into the FV with the golden syrup followed by the hot spray malt and hops strained through a stainless sieve
- Pitch re-hydrated Safbrew WB06 wheat yeast after aerating the wort lots
- Maybe even dry hop the FV after fermentation has finished
Fingers crossed it should turn out like a nice hoppy wheat beer!? 🙂
The Ingredients:
The Wheat Yeast rehydrating in a little boiled water and wheat spray malt:
The Hops just gone in the pan:
The 40 minute boil:
Spent hops in sieve:
FV filled with yeast Pitched at 22 Deg C after a good aeration:
OG reading of about 1038:
Hopefully this will get fermenting by tomorrow 🙂
**Update 7 days later**
Current Gravity reading of 1004 which should put the ABV at 4.46% I’ll bottle in the next weeks time. (Then maybe more Coopers Stout, or the Dark Ale) 😉
**Update 10 days later – Bottled**
01/April/2009 – I’ve just bottled my Geordie lager/Wheat beer, it went pretty well and made 39-off 500ml bottles and about 5-off 330ml’s too. Chipped a bottle slightly to just dumped the whole contents down the sink and threw the bottle, I’ve read about how bad fragments of glass are in your body!!!
Added just over 80g of household sugar to a 100ml sanitized jug of the brew and microwaved to dissolve the sugar for the priming in the bottling bucket. Bottled with my bottling stick, easy as! 🙂
I tasted a little and it was pretty nasty, nothing bad tasting and it certainly smells like an Erdinger… so its 7 days at 20 deg C now then at least 3 weeks (probably 4) at cellar temperature 11-13 Deg C approx.
**Update 19 days later – Sneaky Taste**
I’ve taken to filling a few 330ml Lefe’s when bottling, this way its easy to get a taste of whats conditioning / maturing without cracking open a full 500ml bottle.
Bearing in mind this has only had 9 days in the warm (20 Deg C) followed by a couple of hours in the fridge, its pretty good, the Safbrew WB06 wheat yeast has done its bit with the flavours with a yeasty estery taste, its lacking quite enough fizz but poured with a nice creamy head (3 or 4 more weeks in the cool should help), and I gave the last drop the customary swirl to raise the sediment so it looks like a wheat beer. The Saaz hops maybe aren’t coming through as much as I’d have liked, maybe the wheat and yeast are dampening it down a bit, but its still nice and dry and crisp 🙂
Fingers crossed, this will improve further, its one to do again 🙂
- In: Brewing
- 4 Comments
OK, I’ve gone and done it… these should be pretty different.. One weak and light, and One Dark and bitter!
Its a Geordie Yorkshire Bitter Kit split in two so I can mess around a bit with the brewing process, each of my two Fermentation Vessels
In FV1:
- 20 Pints of Geordie Yorkshire Bitter
- ASDA Smart price Liquor
- 500g Medium Spray malt
- 280g Brewing Sugar (just what I had left in a bag)
- 100g Demerara Sugar
- 20g Target Hops Steeped for 15mins in cafetiere (Hop Tea)
- Kit Yeast used and brought to life for a good couple of hours before pitching
- OG: 1040
In FV2:
- 20 Pints of Geordie Yorkshire Bitter
- ASDA Smart price Liquor
- 500g Light Spray malt
- 20g Saaz Hops steeped for 15mins in cafetiere
- Safale s04 Yeast also working well before pitching
- OG: 1032
Are they going to be OK or awful?
They might both be awful, but I’m thinking of these as experiments before I make a mess of any other kits 🙂
**Update**
The Only Drawback here is I shall probably have to prime my bottles rather than priming my Bottling Bucket (which is FV2).
I do have some other buckets but I’d have to buy a drum tap, I’ll probably stick to 1 Bucket brews after this as I think I bent my head a bit trying to remember what volumes of liquor to add…
I mixed the Kit and the liquor in 1 bucket first to less than the stated full 40 Pints, then had 1L dissolved malt/sugar and 1L-ish of Hop Tea.
They both have a nice rocky head this morning 🙂
My rehydrated yeast was pretty impressive as both the Kit Yeast and the Safale04 were trying to escape from their sterile cling-filmed jugs, the S04 was really going for it. Pitched the Yeast at about 24 Deg C.
As the pictures now show, yeast heads and constant 20 Deg C 🙂
**Second Update**
Looks like FV1 is going to have Alcohol Content (ABV): 2.89% and FV2’s Alcohol Content (ABV): 3.94% as they have both settled at around FG: 1010
**Third Update**
Primed with 40g Brewing Sugar and bottled today (07/03/09) 23 Bottles of each and half a 2L coke bottle, all capped and at 20 Deg C for 1 week. I’ve wrote on all the crown caps so I don’t get them mixed up, GYB Saaz & GYB T – Geordie Yorkshire Bitter Saaz + Light Spray Malt & Geordie Yorkshire Bitter Target + Medium Spray Malt + Brewing Sugar + Demerara.
My sneaky little taste of both brews are quite promissing as they both taste better than the Woodfordes Wherry, I’ll be looking forward to these ones. 🙂 The Saaz batch with the Safale s04 Yeast dropped out almost clear whereas the Kit yeast stayed in suspension a bit more.
The two big plastic buckets I got from work streamlined my bottle sanitizing procedure, it still took me over an hour to clean, sanitize and rinse about 50 bottles though (did some extras so i wouldn’t get caught out). I also got a couple of drum taps from the HBS so I fitted 1 bucket with a tap and used it as my bottling bucket.
Probably Due To Network Congestion 
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