Home Brewing

Leica Geovid Pro - Green
TringSaint said:
Just adjust the amount of brewing sugar added for secondary fermentation. I use 1 tsp per bottle for lagers, 0.75 tsp per bottle for an ipa type ale and 0.5 for heavy ales and stouts.
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I made a great velvet stout. No nitro or Co2. It was last summer and we drank it over Christmas, afaik I used oats give it the creamier texture and worked out the priming sugar on a brewing calc
 
Hook'N'Bullet said:
Yeah, I originally was going that rout but my burco has a cut of at 95 degrees so couldn't get a rolling boil. It would cut, and temp drop down to high 80s and heat back up. I made one smash beer with it and it turned out fine but decided to get a second boiler as it came up cheap. My problem is storing bottles
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You need a man cave!! I can store up to 80 bottles in crates and I have 8 mini kegs I can fill also.
 
TringSaint said:
You need a man cave!! I can store up to 80 bottles in crates and I have 8 mini kegs I can fill also.
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My office is pretty much my man cave. Have a few deer heads abd fox tails in it. Thats about as much as I can get away with! I have about 50 bottles in a sealed box in the attic.
 
Hook'N'Bullet said:
Yeah, I originally was going that rout but my burco has a cut of at 95 degrees so couldn't get a rolling boil. It would cut, and temp drop down to high 80s and heat back up. I made one smash beer with it and it turned out fine but decided to get a second boiler as it came up cheap. My problem is storing bottles
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I’ve got a cure for that. You can circumvent the cut out on the element. At your own risk (😬 like reloading) basically if I recall I installed a jumper. It’s the second element I’ve got through but this one has lasted a couple of years already.
 
Essexsussex said:
I’ve got a cure for that. You can circumvent the cut out on the element. At your own risk (😬 like reloading) basically if I recall I installed a jumper. It’s the second element I’ve got through but this one has lasted a couple of years already.
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Yeah I looked into bypassing the auto cut off but got scared. Decided it was more of a faff than it was worth once I found the second boiler going cheap
 
Well my brewing kit arrived yesterday from The Brewing Centre, and in record time! I ordered it on Wednesday lunchtime and it arrived mid-morning the following day, you can't ask for better service than that from any company (Or the delivery company DPD who delivered it).
(SWMBO had reservations about the CO2 that it gave off so I reassured her by saying that it actually gave off less CO2 than when Me or our dog do do when we trump! :rofl: )
I started it off yesterday evening with a "Geordies Bitter Kit". The only modification I made was instead of using 1lg or white sugar I used 750g of white and 250g of dark brown sugar in the hope that it might give the beer slightly more colour, we will have to see how it turns out. It has been sat in the brewing bucket all night at a temperature of 23 degrees and is now well and truly alive and breathing now so let's see how things go!

Edit - I should have added that when I had finished mixing the brew it gave a hydrometer reading of 1;034 which sounds about right to me. (If I read the hydrometer right)
 
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angusb1 said:
Exciting times! Using dark sugars is something British brewers have done for centuries, hope it works for you.
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I'll let you know in a few weeks time, as they say "The proof of the pudding is in the eating"! :tiphat:
If anyone has any tips for keeping "My little baby" healthy and happy I would welcome them!
 
a great thread to appear! I've just started back into the brewing

Put a masterpint Czech lager on last week. Have done a few before, but always had a bit of a yeasty homebrew tang to them....so being an engineer and having a problem to solve:
Cheap fridge, inkbird controller, heater pad and swap out the yeast for 34/70 saflager and use extra light spraymalt instead of sugar- bubbling away at exactly 10C
Will raise to 16C near the end of fermentation for a diactyl rest (gets rid of the odd flavours seemingly)
Then cold crash it for a couple of weeks (drop to 1 - 2 C)- makes the yeast clump and drop out of suspension)
Clear it with gelatine (pulls more yeast out of it)
Into a corny keg (Mall Miller setup)
Put under CO2 in the fridge for 3 months nice and cool....

but in the meantime throw on a Coopers Irish stout with extra dark spraymalt and that can happily sit at 18 degrees then follow the similar approach above, but drinkable much sooner. Will need to order a bottle of nitrogen / co2to give it the proper consistency - apparently this is called guiness mix

now if it all tastes like old socks i'll be mightily disappointed...but will have given it everything!

Also if it doesn't work there might be a load of kit going cheap in the classifieds!
 
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I would give it a go it is quite satisfying. I used to make it from a kit as I liked the flavour in 40 pint batches, I did not mess about with bottles but served it as draft, the father-in-law loved it as well and was always up for a pint.
It is quite easy to make a strong pint just add more sugar to the strength that you want but you can kill the yeast above 15% though is that strong enough ha ha. Enjoy.
 
TringSaint said:
Keep the temperature stable - don’t want fluctuations.
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I am keeping an eye on the temperature and for now it is stable and running at around 23 degrees, and the brew is bubbling away/fermenting nicely, in fact it has picked up momentum a little!
Thanks for the tip, little tips like that are very useful to a complete novice like myself! :tiphat:
 
It was brew day!

I'm going to post a bit of detail here so chaps like @royalewithcheese and others can give feedback. As this was the first time using my new equipment, not knowing boil off rates etc, it was a trial run.

I based it on a wheat beer recipe with the following stats -

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My recipe -
  • Maris Otter - 2.25kg
  • Extra Pale Wheat Malt - 2.25kg
  • Flaked Wheat - 500g
  • Chit Malt - 50g
  • Magnum Hops - 10g @ 60mins
  • Orange Peel @ 15mins

Notes from the brewing.

  • Total water - 25L
  • Post Mash - 23L
  • Pre Boil Grav - 1030
  • Post Boil - 16.4L
  • Post Boil Grav - 1064
As I had a lot more water loss than the batch called for and 1064 being higher than I wanted for the beer, it got topped off to around 19L for a gravity of 1054 which is what the calculator predicted.

Until I look at it properly, im losing around 0.4L per kg of grain for BIAB and 6.6L of boil off per hour.

My strike temp was 73c as I expected it to drop initially but only dropped to 70c when the grain was added, so a bit high.

After 45mins the mash temp was 65c. Maybe it will be a bit astringent, not sure. The PH started around 6 too, pretty sure I got it to around 5.5 with some lactic acid.

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