The Chaos that is a Buffers Brewery brew day

Buffers brewery · Dec 13, 2024

Had my last brewday this year yesterday. An uneventful day brewing a simple pale ale. As I have two +5%ABV beers on tap at the moment and a 6.4%ABV conditioning as we speak, I reduced the grain bill to aim for a sub 4%ABV beer. 3.5kg Maris Otter Pale malt and 350g of Carapils yielded 5 gallons of wort at 1.041. 100g of Cascade pellets and 20g of Amarillo pellets were added during and after the boil. As last time I left the wort in the boiler overnight to settle before transferring to the fermenter.

Wort temperature was 14C. Last time I brought the wort temperature up to 20C before adding the yeast. This time added the yeast, Liberty Bell, and moved it to the brew fridge set at 20C. It'll be interesting to see if and when it starts bubbling.

Buffers brewery · Dec 14, 2024

Bubbling away nicely. Low temperature start doesn't appear to have had any effect......yet!

Buffers brewery · 2025-01-21T18:12:27+0000

My last brew of 2024 is finishing 2 weeks conditioning next weekend and I have two empty barrels after the Christmas festivities so time for the first brew of 2025. It's going to be a repeat of the Tribute clone that I copied from @Clint but with a 10% reduction in the grain bill from last time. Trying to get the ABV around 4.5 - 4.7.
Grain bill was 2.9kg Maris Otter pale malt, 900gm Munich malt and 360gm Carapils. Mashed for an hour at 66C.
Pre-boil volume was 30 litres and hop additions
Fuggles 16gm for 60 mins
Willamette 19gm for 60 mins
Fuggles 15gm for 15 mins
Willamette 12gm for 15 mins
Celeia 25gm @ 80C for 15 mins
Willamette 50gm @ 80C for 15 mins.

A quarter of a protofloc tablet was added to the boil at the 15 minutes mark and the wort was circulated through the NEW counterflow chiller (the outer jacket was empty).
Speaking of the new chiller, here's my now extended brewery...

A bit of complicated plumbing….

Starting to circulate the hot wort through the chiller…

My chiller setup. I use the pump from my HERMS circuit to pump the boiling wort through the chiller…

Wort temperature dropped from 100C to 80C in a couple of minutes when I turned the cold water feed off for the 15 minute hop stand. By the time the hop stand had finished the wort temperature had cooled to 70C. The cold water feed was turned on again and the wort temperature reached 20C in 20 minutes.
The wort OG was 1.046…