This turned out to be a very relaxed brewday with my new mashtun. Because I hadn’t sorted out the sparge manifold to my satisfaction just yet, I reverted to batch sparging for this one – there’s plenty of headroom in the thermo box after all!
The plan was to make a dry Irish stout, not a million miles away from Guinness in terms of overall bitterness, but with the added fun of using my own grown WGV hops in the copper. I added a small amount of wheat malt for head and feel. I also ordered liquid yeast especially for this brew, although I probably ought to have given it more time to multiply ahead of brewday – ah well, it’ll be fine I’m sure.
Anyway, here’s the full recipe:
Boxshed Seasonal Stout
Date: 08/11/2008
Style: Dry Stout (Irish)
Batch Size: 23.00 L
Boil Volume: 32.00 L
Boil Time: 60 min
Brewhouse Efficiency: 75.0 %
Ingredients
3.75 kg Pale Malt (2 Row) UK (5.9 EBC) 68.2%
0.8 kg Flaked Barley (3.3 EBC) 14.5%
0.75Kg Roasted Barley (591 EBC) 13.6%
0.2Kg Wheat Malt (3.9 EBC) 3.6%
65.00 gm Whitbread Golding Variety (WGV) [5% est.] (60 min) Hops 36.7 IBU
Protofloc Tablet (15 min)
1 Pkgs Irish Ale yeast (White Labs WLP004)
Batch Sparge
Mash Grain Weight: 5.25kg Mash PH: 5.4 PH
Grain Temperature: 13.0 C
Mash In Add 13L of water at 69.3C (63C) 90 min
Step Add 11L of water at 67.7 (65C) 10 min
Step Add 11L of water at 80C (75C) 10 min
Beer Profile
Estimated Original Gravity: 1.050 SG
Estimated Final Gravity: 1.014
Estimated Color: 62.6 EBC
Bitterness: 36.7 IBU
Alpha Acid Units: 1.9 AAU
Estimated Alcohol by Volume: 4.8%
Below are some photos and descriptions of the day. I mashed-in at around 11am in the end, and pitched around 4pm, managing to fit the process around various chores. The new mashtun was superb and made me want to replace my boiler with something equally cool looking and move my boiler to be the HLT. One day, maybe. In the end I got 23L exactly in the fermenter with no need to add any further liquor, but I missed the 1.050 OG and got 1.048 istead. I’m putting this down to not compensating for the switch to batch sparging, which seems reasonable.
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All out of malt until a friend who runs a micro sorted me out with some organic pale malt from the local maltsters
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I splashed out and ordered the best yeast for the recipe that I could find from H&G
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Although I only had 24 hours to do it in, I made a quick litre starter using spraymalt
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I had to move some shelves around a little but the new mash tun looked great and worked brilliantly
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In went all the pale malt, flaked barley and wheat…
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…then the important dark stuff!
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I mashed for 90 minutes at a coolish temperature to add dryness then returned plenty of black runnings
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The mash tun manifold worked well thankfully!
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I decided to batch sparge with two 11L additions but will sort out a sparge attachment for that MT lid very soon
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WGV hops grown in my back garden. Looked an awful lot and I don’t know the AA, but estimated around 5% for 36ish IBUs
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Watered, nurtured, picked, dried, frozen, boiled!
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Lovely mountain of green into the boil with the last batch from the tun still to come
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The last batch ran on top of the hops into the already boiling copper
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It doesn’t get much closer than that. Only a 60 minute boil for this one
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The new tun really did the business. Here it is drained dry
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The boil went very smoothly. Chiller in. I really missed the late addition of aroma hops. It’s probably my favourite part of my normal brewday
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I let the cooled wort sit for half an hour longer than the cooling required and it really seemed to pay off in reducing the break in the fermenter
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Starter roused and ready to pitch. I pitched it while the wort was running into the FV this time for a change
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Aerated this so well it instantly turned into a giant pint of stout
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Safely in the fermenter and bubbling away very nicely after just a couple of hours
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