Brewing: Summer Lightning Clone

I've just finished making my second ever extract brew with the boiler She Who Must bought me for Christmas ages ago. I used the same recipe as before (a clone of Hopback's Summer Lightning from Graham Wheeler's 'Brew Your Own British Real Ale' book), but with some changes. I decided to try using liquid malt extract instead of powdered, because it's cheaper and the powder is a real ball ache. I also now have a proper set of scales so could measure the hopping more accurately. Lastly, I added more liquor so it will be weaker than it should be (the original is about 5%, which explains all of those drunken summer afternoons in the Jolly Brewmaster).

My overwhelming impression of the experience was how long it took to do. Several things lead to it taking much longer than I anticipated:

1. The boiler kept cutting out after the 1st hour of boiling. This is apparently a well known problem with my boiler, and down to the thermostat and the element having temperature cut-outs built in. I don't remember this happening last time, so I'm going to try cleaning the limescale off the element before next time.
2. I had to cool the wort using a couple of frozen coke bottles full of water. This seemed ingenious to me when I thought it up, and I imagined plunging the frozen bottles into the wort with steam flying up round my ears. It was, in reality, much less dramatic and less effective than I thought. It took well over half an hour for the wort to cool to pitching temperature, meaning I didn't get a cold break (the beer will be cloudy), and it took longer.
3. I don't have a hop filter fitted to the tap of the boiler, and couldn't find any hop bags, meaning that the tap got very clogged up with hop debris when I was running the wort out into the fermenter. This took absolutely ages, and I ended up having to blow up through the tap several times to clear it.

After this experience, I have decided that I need the following pieces of equipment:

1. An immersion chiller
2. A hop filter for the boiler (one to fit 'Electrim boilers')

It is my birthday coming up, so my family should really be reading this...

Anyhow, the beer is fermenting now (I hope), I realised after I'd opened the packet of Safale yeast that there is twice as much as such a short brew needs in that pack, so I'm hoping it should go like bajeezus. I ended up getting about 8ltr from the boiler and topped that up to 12 in the fermenter to give me a starting gravity of 1.035. it should turn out as a nice, session type ale, but very very hoppy (possibly too hoppy).

Don't call it a comeback

Things have been deadly quite on here for over a year, which is a real shame. Anyhow, I stopped brewing for a while thanks to a couple of brews going bad in a row and work becoming more hectic. i was also a little worried about how much beer this hobby was making me drink, so I had to think of different ways of doing it.

So, now to the present. I've moved house with my lovely fiancee (can't work out how to get the accent on the 'e') and now live in a lovely cottage. Several friends have pointed out that this house suits homebrewing so it'd be a crime not to do any, therefore: I'm starting up again. Last week I brewed up a kit for Woodforde's Great Eastern Ale and it is doing pretty well. I tested it today (about a week on) and it's down to 1.019 from 1.040, so I'm planning on leaving it in the fermenter for another week (I'm pretty sure I remember leaving things for 2 weeks before) and then whack it into some mini-kegs. That's the other thing: it's my plan to stop me drinking the stuff too much. I'll split the brew into mini kegs so that it'll keep better and I'll only have to drink it up once I've cracked into a keg. It won't last as long once opened as a standard large keg will, but that'll just stop me from tapping one on a whim on a Tuesday night.

Anyhow, I'll update here next week when I've (hopefully) put the Great Eastern in the kegs and talk about what I have planned next...

Update: Fixby Gold

Just got a chance to test this today, after roughly 2 weeks in the fermenter.  It's dropped down to 1.012, which I reckon means it has stopped.  Unfortunately, my second pressure barrel sprung a leak with the last brew I had in it so I need to buy a new one before I can barrel this.  Hopefully that should arrive by next weekend and I'll sling it in there then.  An extra week to let the yeast settle out a bit more shouldn't hurt it.

On another note, a friend and I got pretty seriously stuck into the Terrier last night and it was good.  Didn't even feel too bad this morning either...

Brewing: Fixby Gold

So I put this brew on a few days back (Tuesday 7th) but haven't got round to blogging about it till today.  As it is a two can kit it was really easy to sling into the fermenter and get going.  I'm a bit worried as it didn't get a massive foamy head going up in the first day, but it seems to still be going quite strong.

The Terrier is building up lots of gas but is not clear enough for drinking yet.

Brewing: Yorkshire Terrier

So it's been ages since i posted anything here, because it has been ages since I brewed anything.  Various things have happened to stop me from doing anything but now they have all calmed down I figured I should get back to it, even if just to do a kit and get my beer stocks back up.

Handily, I had a kit knocking about that the old housemate (She Who Must moved in the other week...) bought me for my birthday.  It was Yorkshire Terrier by York Brewery, so I stuck that on.  It was pretty much a standard kit apart from it had a pack of hop pellets to steep first.  They didn't come in any sort of permeable bag so I whcked them in a hop bag I had knocking about so I could yank them out when the steeping was done.  Not sure if this was the right thing to do as the instructions were very vague, but I'm sure it won't change much.  Other than this the main memory I have of this brew is how much of a pain it is to dissolve spraymalt.  It took ages and all the stirring I had to do made a bit of a mess, but it got done in the end.

I pitched a pack of Safale S04 by just sprinkling it on (normally I rehydrate but actually read the packet this time which said just to sprinkle).  Checked it this morning and there's a massive head of foam in the fermenter, so it's all good I guess.  I'm a little worried as I had a taste of the wort before pitching and it was very hoppy, almost astringent, so I hope this doesn't turn out like the St Peter's brew that I did last which had such a weird after taste (probably from the hop powder) that I only drank half of it...

Anyhow, we'll see how it goes.

Brewing: Summer Lightning clone (First ever extract brew!)

So, this is the beginning of my extract phase of my brewing journey.  I'll explain it all in more detail at some other point but this basically means that I'm no longer relying on someone else to do the hopping for me, but I am relying on them to do the extraction of the the sugars from the malt.  Luckily for you, I managed to take some photos whilst doing it, so i'll talk you through how it went down...

I decided I wanted to do a really simple brew for my first go so I chose the clone of Summer Lightning in Graham Wheeler's near ubiquitous book Brew Your Own British Real Ale.  As I also only wanted to be making 10 litres at a time to start with, I plugged the recipe into Beer Engine (also by Graham Wheeler, he seems like a great guy).  This meant I would only be using small amounts of hops so instead of using 2 different types of hop (1 for bittering, 1 for aroma) I decided I could afford to use just the one hop.  This really means that the beer I've made isn't much like Summer Lightning anymore, but oh well.  The long and the short of it is that I ended up with recipe for 10 litres of a simple, one type of malt and one type of hop beer.

After all of that japery, and having ordered the ingredients etc, I finally got down to brewing today. 

I started by marking out some measurements on the inside of my boiler as the ones on it already are a) on the outside so you can't see the water level, and b) pretty obviously wrong.

I then weighed out the ingredients, the Spraymalt was quite easy as I needed 1400 grammes and had 1x1kg bag and 1x500g bag.  The hops were a little less easy as I need 31g, 10g and 6g, and my small, precise scales were not to hand.  This meant that most of my hop amounts were enitrely guessed (the first thing that could make this a disaster).

Once the ingredients were weighed out, I mixed the Spraymalt into the water that had already been warming upto about 50C.  This was just as tough as it is when doing kit brews and gave me a really sore wrist, but got done eventually.  The froth on top here is a product of my thrashing it, not any boiling or anything.

Once it was all stirred in, I turned the thermostat up and set out to get the stuff boiling.  I was pretty chuffed with this thermometre holding arrangement until (about a minute after this picture was taken) the tape gave up and dropped the thermometre in.  I just had to hope that I wouldn't find it smashed at the bottom once I drained the boiler.

This is it just starting to boil.  The frothy stuff here is scuzzy material that gets kicked up by the boiling.  This part of the brewing is called the hot break.

The froth built up incredibly quickly and because I was taken photos, I almost didn't notice it has pretty much reached the top of the boiler.  Luckily I turned it down in time and it settled down again.

Once that died down I chucked in the first lot of hops( ~31g).  I'm using hop bags at the moment because I don't have a hop filter fitted to the tap.

It seems I forgot to take any photos when the other two hop additions happened, but one of these (~10g) went in 10 minutes before the end, and the other lot (~6g) went in right at the end and just got steeped for a while.  This was the less than satisfactory solution I came up with for the shelf thing I had the boiler on not being high enough.

After some searching I found stuff to build up the shelf with, and it went pretty smoothly from there.

I ended up getting pretty much exactly 10 litres, but I'm not sure what OG it has yet (will update when I know).

This is the junk left in the boiler after I ran the wort out, the astute among you will notice the thermometre (not smashed) wedged at the bottom.

And this is where it is as I type.  Obviously the wort is really hot afte the boil so it need to be cooled before pitching the yeast, hence standing it in cold water.  Ideally, it should be cooled much quicker (crash cooled) to facilitate a cold break, which helps it clear.  I don't have the equipment to do that, though, so this'll have to do.




Thanks for reading, I'll update you as the fermentation of this one proceeds.

EDIT: Finally got around to pitching this at about 10:00.  It had been at a low enough temp for a while actually, but I was engrossed in the leadership debate so couldn't do anything about it. I suppose I should give this brew a suitably election-based name, but can't think of one yet.  Answers on a postcard.

Brewing: St Peter's Ruby Red AND General updates and whinery

Hey, so it's been ages huh?  Truth be told, I kinda fell out of love with brewing after the Geordie Mild went down with the same infection as the Old Ale before it and the Wherry ended up having been left too long and gone off, then decided to leak all over my record collection (thank god MDF is so absorpent -no records were harmed!).  I've gotta be honest, I felt pretty low about the whole thing.  But this weekend it seemed about time to head back into Pop's and pick up a new kit.  I initially went for Fixby Gold until I saw that they had the new(ish) St Peter's Ruby Red kit in.  I've heard great things about both this beer and the kit, so figured I'd pull the trigger on it.

So I left the fermenting vessel sterilising all night and day, then sterilised it again with all the equipment in it when I got home from school today and set about brewing.  It's a pretty standard 2 can kit (open can, pour in contents, add water) apart from the fact that it comes with a sachet of 'hop powder'.  It seems this is maltodextrin powder (some kinda sugar) infused with hop oils.  You make up the kit as usual, then add this powder and stir it in.  The hop smell is pretty damned powerful when you open it and stirring it in made the beer smell wonderful.

So anyway, I just put this to bed in the boiler room, will maybe check on it in a few days.  Another thing I have done to avoid contamination is leave the immersion heater out (in fact, I've thrown it away in a fit of frustration) as I think that may have been harbouring germs.

As ever, thanks for reading, and I'll update you when I check on this baby...

Brewing: Geordie Mild

Not wanting to let the infection-appendix disaster of 2010 put me off, I have jumped straight into making a new brew.  The only kit I had knocking about was a can Geordie Mild, which is a budget kit so I made it up with 1kg of medium spraymalt.  It all went without a hitch (as far as I can tell so far), and I deliberately made it in a different fermenting bin, to avoid cross contamination.

OG came out at 1.036, which is a bit low (suppose that suits a mild) but perfectly respectable nonetheless.

Brewing: Brewer's Choice Old Ale

So I'm back at school tomorrow so probably should have been finishing off lesson plans and that sort of gubbins today, but the Linthwaite is looking kinda low and I need this brew to be ready to go into that barrel when it's empty, so figured I'd stick it on now.

Only took a few photos partly because most of what I did has been charted on here already and partly because I was also cooking dinner towards the end of the brew so didn't really have time.  So let's go:

The ingredients for this brew.  This particular kit is different from the others I've done in that it's a dry kit.  In that there silvery packet are some muslin bags containing various specialty grains and hops, which get steeped in hot water for a time, then the liquid i mixed with all that Spraymalt (2kg of the stuff) and diluted to the standard 23 litres.  I liked the fact that I didn't have to open any cans.

This is the bags in the pan, ready to have boiling water poured over them.  As far as i could tell, there was one bag of hop pellets (Fuggles I think) and three different bags of grains (no idea what they were).

The bags steeping.  They give off a wonderful smell.

And finally here are the used bags, looking much like spent tea bags.  I had a good old poke and sniff of them and ascertained that one of the grain bags was quite fine, black and smoky, making me think it was black malt or something similar.  Another smelt kind of caramellish, so that could be Caramel, but I'm no expert.
After doing this process 3 times (a 20 minute steep each time), the rest of the brew was the same as ever: mixing in loads of spraymalt, adding cold water and pitching yeast.  I think it all went well, but the proof will be in the drinking in about 2 months.

I guess that's me done, thanks for reading, I'm off to bed to panic about tomorrow...

Brewing Woodforde's Wherry

Got home from school earlier than usual tonight (because there are parents evenings this week so I try and get away as early as possible on the other days to make up for it), so I decided that it was finally time to put this Wherry on.  And I took pictures! So here we go:

Started off by cleaning the sink area throughly

Threw all the equipment into the fermenting bucket, added sanitiser powder and filled with hot water

While waiting for the stuff to sanitise, I started getting the yeast ready.  Here it is in the packet: Safale S04, a good substitute for kit yeast, which is normally rubbish.

I poured some boiled water into a sterilised mug and let it cool to 20C or so, then sprinkled the packet onto the top of the water.  Covered the mug with a plate and put it to one side.

At this point I figured I'd get the kit out and start sorting it out.  This is what I'm brewing: Woodforde's Wherry (based on a commercial brew, although I've never tried it).

Put the 2 massive cans into hot water to soften the wort inside

Meanwhile, back in the bathroom...the FV is full of sanitising fluid.

When all the stuff had been in the fluid for 15 minutes, I took it out, rinsed it and left it on the side.

Finally it was time to open the cans up.  This is the first one, after an epic struggle with the tin opener...

Wort being poured into the bucket, the smell that comes off it is heavenly.

Filled each can up with boiled water and stirred to dissolve any wort left on the sides of the can

This is the mixture after both cans and two cans of boiling water were put in.  I normally give it a good stir at this point to dissolve all the wort and stop large globs of it sticking to the bottom and not dissolving properly.

Topping it all up with cold water, note my handy, improvised 2 litre jug...

Hydrometer reading after it's topped up to 23 litres.  You'll have to believe me that it is 1.040

Here we return to our friend S04, who has rehydrated nicely.  Now I just have to pour this into the brew, drop the heater in, plug it in and pop the lid on and we are...

...DONE!

Thanks for reading, hopefully this will show some people how easy this whole business is and make them want to try it...