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).

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...)

All set for 2010!

Merry New Year! I hope the next year holds a whole pile of wonderfulness for all of you, and that you had a marvellous Christmas full of drinking and far too much food (I certainly did).  Santa brought me some brilliant brewery related presents, which I shall share with you now.
First up, a group shot:

A book of recipes; a general book about setting up a brewery properly; an Electrim 'Mashing Bin' (really a boiler) and (best of all) my very own Boiler Room Brewery T-Shirt (merchandise may become available very soon...)

Another shot of the T-Shirt 'cos I love it so much:

And finally the inside of the boiler (needs a hop filter made for it really, but I intend to start off just using hop bags to save needing one.  It's essentially a plastic bucket with a kettle element and a tap, but I could never have made one myself as some people have.  The best thing about it is the thermostat.

Also on the way, but not yet with me thanks to Hop and Grape being out of stock, is a 'mini keg starter set' made by Brewferm, which I'll obviously put photos of up here when it does arrive.

I'm hoping tomorrow I'll get time to put the next kit (a Brewer's Choice Old Ale) on tomorrow, so you may well hear from me then...

Future Plans

So I'm feeling in a speculative mood (looking to accumulate, y'see) so thought I'd put some of my ideas for developing the Boiler Room into more than a glorified bucket...

For Christmas, I have various relatives and significant others coordinated to hopefully furnish me with some lovely new kit so that I can move to the next level.(Extract brewing).

First up, SWMBO (the light of my life) will hopefully be getting me one of these bad boys which, while it calls itself a mash bin, is a boiler with an electric element and a thermostat thingy. This is what I will use to boil the malt extract and hops up together so that they can do their mgical stuff.  It's a 25 litre capacity, so should just about be able to manage a 23l boil (40 pints) without too much risk of boil over but I intend to start off with just very small batches of about 10 litres.  My thinking is that this will enable me to hone my skills more and try out more different things without ending up with huge amounts of beer to drink (I've heard that the stuff's not overly good for you in large amounts...)

And from my parents I'm hoping to receive one of these nifty starter sets.  This is because 10litres is nowhere near enough to put in a big pressure keg like the 2 I have atm, it would risk infection or something.  So the plan is to put half of each 10l batch into one of these, then bottle the other half, giving me a stock of bottles for comparisons and gifts, then a mini keg of each brew to crack open when desired, or take to parties.  The tap system on these is also simpler than the S30, meaning that the flatmate might feel better about drinking my brews.

As I said, my plan is to get a good few extract brews under my belt, then move on to all gain brewing, probably doing small batches to start off with again, but after I'm used to how to do it, who knows!

Plans for the more immediate future are to get the Woodforde's Wherry kit I have on my shelf going at some point this week to give it plenty of time to stop fermenting and start clearing before the budget barrel is available...