Update: St Peter's Ruby Red

I've been tasting small amounts of the Ruby Red every now and then since it went into the barrel and I have to say I started out disappointed.  It had a very harsh, almost astringent hop aftertaste to start with.  Tried a bit today and it seems it is starting to get better, so here's hoping for it being really nice in about two/three weeks.

Update: I Agree With Nick (Summer Lightning clone)

Gave this a test this evening.  The SG is down to 1.016, which seems a little high so might leave it another day or so.  As ever, I tasted the sample and it had a good level of sweetness and was very bitter (probably something to do with the slapdash way I measured the hops), but this should mellow after some conditioning.

My main worry is that it looks very cloudy and there were large chunks of what appear to be spraymalt floating about in it.  I guess this is down to me not mixing the extract in well enough before the boil but I don't think it will effect the beer particularly.  I really hope it clears well in the keg, or it'll be a bit disconcerting to drink.

Name for Summer Lightning clone, and Homebrew Primer started

I mentioned the other day wanting an election themed name for the brew I made the other day and Housemate has come up with one for me.  As I made the beer on the day of the first televised debate, it will be called "I agree with Nick" as that was such a popular phrase during the debate.

Also in the news, I have begun writing a Homebrew Primer.  Several people at school have asked me to write a little thing that explains the process of homebrewing and the equipment one needs etc.  On account of me being nice and all, I decided to oblige and sat down yesterday and wrote.  It all came quite easily and I ended up with about 3,500 words written quite quickly (about 6 pages).  I'm going to write one more section, edit it it etc. then make it available for free download on this site.  It will start off just about getting into kit brewing as that's the simplest and the one I know most about, but it will expand when I learn more about the other methods.

Update: Summer Lightning clone

Checked on this this morning and it has started fermenting away nicely.  I didn't put the OG on here last night, but it was 1.044, which is a bit higher than it should have been (1.041), but that's cool, it'll just be stronger.

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.

Boiler Test

So now that the kegs to put my own creations in have arrived, I'm going to start actually making them, putting my boiler to use.  This means that I have to test the boiler to make sure that it a) holds water, b) heats water up and c) keeps that water at the temperature it reaches.  I also need to measure how much water it loses during a long boil.  When I know this, I can plug the loss figure into Beer Engine and work out how much water I need to put in at the start of the boil in order to get a beer the right strength (does this make sense?).

The water is in and the element is on, I'll fill you in when the test has progressed further...

EDIT: It just finished getting up to 70C, which is roughly where I'll need it for steeping grains.  At some point I'll need to figure out how to get it to stay at that temp, but right now I'm leaving it on full to get it to boil.

EDIT 2: Up to the boil now, just need to let it do its thing for 90 mins and measure how much less water is in there at the end...

EDIT 3: Forgot to update this earlier (went to the pub instead), but after a 90 minute boil, the water had gone down by about 4 litres.  This seems like quite lot to me, but that's how it went...I'm just about set to start extract brewing now, so expect a post about that in the next few days (while I'm on easter holidays...)

New Stuff AND St Peter's goes in the barrel

So, I remember mentioning in a previous post that as well as all the swell stuff I got for Chistmas, I was due something else that hadn't arrived in time on account of stock shortage or something.  Well, it arrived and my parents brought it up to me last weekend.

These will be what I put my self-designed beers into so that I don't have to make (and drink) huge amounts of experimental beer that might taste rank.  They should also get a bit of use at parties as they're a good size and less complicated than the other kegs I have.  This is how one keg looks with the tap fitted:

The kegs themselves are pretty cheap too so I expect to buy a few more and get a good rotation going on them.  There is also a plan in the pipeline to use these kegs to deliver homemade beer to my friends and family, which I shall elabourate on further once I've worked out exactly how it will work.

Also in the news today: The St Peter's Ruby Red has been put in the barrel and is hopefully doing its secondary fermenting as we speak.  I'll let you know how it tastes in a week (I'm not going to wait for it to mature properly).