May 4, 2007

More on the brew

Category: Strong Bitter — Josh @ 9:35 pm

I collected a total of 11 quarts of wort from mashing @ a SG of 1.036 @ 90F which is 1.040 corrected for temperature. Using the calculations located on How to Brew chapter 12-5,I calculated an efficiency of 65%. Not great, but not terrible. My final gravity for this one after the sugar edition came out to 1.052 @ 77F (1.054 corrected; 6 gallons).

I think the efficiency of my mash is low due to mash water temperature only 150F starting. The milling of the grain. Hearts homebrew only has one setting for their malt mill, and they refuse to double grind grain. I tried rolling the grain with my rolling pin, but it is not a substitute for a good malt mill. (On a totally separate side note I hate shopping at Hearts. The guy that is usually there has a poor attitude. They could sell so much more stuff if he was more willing to help customers)

After the wort was all boiled and the hops spent, I placed the pot into the sink and dumped two 5 lbs bags of ice around the pot then filled the sink with water (don’t forget the stopper). I usually only use a few trays of ice for my normal brew and use more bottled spring water from the refrigerator, but my starting boil this time contained almost three gallons of wort, and I needed to cool this wort down more than I usually do.

Another thing is that While I was straining out the hops with my normal stainless steel basket strainer, the hops almost filled the entire basket. It was so many leaves that I knew that there was a lot of sugars in the hops, so I poured the other 2.5 gallons of cold spring water from the fridge through the hops and into the carboy. I did this for my previous batch of bitter with good success.

I was short some water and was only up to the 5 gallon mark, I usually fill up to the 6 gallon mark. I emptied 8 more .5 liter bottles of spring water into the carboy to get it up to the 6 gallon mark. After I topped it up with water, I took a SG reading then put the airstone into the wort. I turned the air on low and oxygenated the wort for 30 minutes, then pitched the yeast.

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