Made In England

After finishing off my last changes to my home made grain, brew recipe I’m just preparing to start brewing. Here’s the account of brew day, I’m going to list what I do as I do it:

1. Washing and sanitizing – This took ages.
2. Boil rice and grind grain – Mix. Hopefully I didn’t damage too many enzymes when I put the hot rice next to the grain, still I should have enough from the other grains that weren’t close to the rice.
3. Heat water up to 67 degrees (I’m aiming for a mash temperature of 66 degrees Celsius for this recipe. I don’t want it to be sweet like my last beers, but as I didn’t put much crystal malt in this one, I’ve decided to go for a slightly higher mash temperature to make some unfermentable sugars. Besides, I’m adding inverted sugar directly to the boil, so there should be enough fermentable sugars anyway).
4. Add grains to water, put a lid on it and set a 60 minute timer going. As there is rice in the recipe, I expect to have to mash for a little longer to convert the starch in the rice too. However, there’s not much rice (only 0.5kg) and my base (Pilsner Malt) has a very high diastatic power, so perhaps 60 minutes of mashing will be enough…?
5. After 40 minutes I checked the temperature. It had increased to 69 degrees. This has happened a few times now, I can only imagine that this is because the starch to sugar conversion is an exothermic reaction. I’ve decided to just leave it going at this temperature because I don’t have a clear idea in my mind about how the final beer will taste – perhaps a little extra sugar in the finished beer will be a good thing?
6. After 60 minutes of mashing, a taste test and Iodine test both showed that the wort was ready. I squeezed the BIAB bag very thoroughly and even did a sparge this time. The sparge added a lot of extra wort and I kept sparging until the resultant wort seemed to have a grainy quality. Noteably the sparged wort was much less sweet than the other wort. I think I managed to sparge an extra 3 litres out of the grain, so good efficiency.
7. As I left the wort to come to the boil while I prepared the hops and updated my blog (things I should have done earlier at the mashing stage), I almost had a boil over (The lid was on while it was reaching boil temperature). That was an impressive boil over and climbed about 30cm up the walls of my pot. I found about 10g (guess because my scalres aren’t accurate) of Celia Styring Goldings hops, which I decided to mix with my 30 minute hops.
8. Once the wort reached a boil I dispatched my flavoured inverted sugar into the wort and gave it a quick stir. I thought to measure out just 300g instead because the wort was successfully sweet and I think that with a slightly nutty beer, a lower alcohol content might not be an unwelcome flavour. Nevertheless, I didn’t really have time so I chucked the lot in (save one piece which I ate). After tasting the wort and inverted sugar (which was looking to produce a nice beer so far), I regretted adding any additional sugars at all. I don’t think that the flavour of the inverted sugar I made works well with the nutty flavour of the grains, mainly because of the citrusy zesty flavour. I may have turned an otherwise delicious batch of beer into an average one with funky flavours. I might do well to adhere to the German Export Laws as a guideline for producing any beer other than Belgian styles in future
9. Waiting… Waiting… Waiting… Just thinking about my inverted sugar that I made with lemon juice (and other citrus flavours), the Westmalle monks have a beer that is only (supposed to be) available within the monestary for monks and guests use only. The beer is called Westmalle Extra and is said to have lemon flavours to it.
   Perhaps I might end up calling this beer “Extra Nutty” as a reference to the lemon in Westmalle Extra and the nutty malts used in this brew?
10. 50 minutes into the boil and I’ve added the remaining hops and the wort cooler. It smells nice and hoppy, but the usual hoppy froth isn’t there. I wish I had a little more hops available that I could use to balance the flavour of the citrus a bit better. I’m sorely tempted just to chuck the aroma hops into the wort without the hop sock. I guess we’ll just see how it turns out. Funny, I was just saying to Scarlett that once you know what you’re doing it’s hard to go wrong when brewing beer. I stand by that statement, but today I’ve shown myself that I still don’t really know what I’m doing
11. 62 minutes passed and I’ve decided to leave the hops in the wort as it cools. I’ve also moved the remaining yeast from an earlier batch of beer into the cleaned and sanitized carboy, ready for the wort to be added when cooled.
    Noteably, since selling my second wort cooler (which I usually use in conjunction with my first wort cooler), it’s taking a while longer to cool the wort
12. The wort has cooled to 28 degrees C and at a gravity of 1.055 + 0.003 for temperature comphensation give an original gravity of 1.058 (It started at 1.070, but I added a good few litres to this). Finally (6.5 hours later) I have 23 litres of beer (wort, hops & yeast) sitting in the carboy at 24 degrees C and already fermenting 5 minutes after putting it in the carboy. How? I put a lot of yeast in the carboy, so although it’s working slowly, the volume of yeast is already passing some air through the airlock