Well Here we go with the piccies . . . there are some more to come but these are mine.
The Grain bill
450Kg Pale (18 Sacks)
25Kg Amber (1 Sack)
25Kg Munich (1Sack)
12Kg Caramalt
Here is the copper - 18BBL
And here is the mash tun and 20BBL HLT, with its spinny sparger
And the rather fancy control panel
Crushing The Grain
Well not all of it it was only the Munich that was whole. And then here we are doughing in
And 21 Bags Later
Ok so that was a bit too easy . . . get on to breaking up those lumps.
While they were doughing in someone had to clean out the big copper
Before runningoff the wort as this was a partigyle we wanted to pump some of the first runnings to the small copper . . . which was in the 'old' brewery next door . . "Got Any O's?""
From the Mash Tun the wort runs off into this automatic underback
So from the grist we decided to run off about 2.5 BBL of the first runnings into the small copper and boil this down for a barley wine
. . . so using an approximation of double the hopping rate (.7668Kg/BBL)for the Simmonds bitter gives us 400g, 800g, 1200g, 1600g, 2000g And counting of Fuggles
Stir in the hops, and finally 3Kg of hops in for bittering . . . Just wait for it to reduce now.
Back to the big plant . . . We stopped the run off into the underback and reset all the piping . . . the wort at this stage is really sticky (OG 1.096) and very sweet . . . its hot too, so lets start filling the large copper
And at this pit some bright spark decided to ask the obvious question . . . is the hop filter in place? . . . Of course not
After the hop filter was expertly fitted by Phil, we continued to run off a considerable amount of wort, even when we had 14BBL at 1.051 in the copper we still had runnings of 5.2Brix . . . time to boil off some wort before adding the first lot of fuggles (8.8Kg!!) as we want to try and hit the target gravity of 1.062 In the meantime Phil pointed out that someone had to clean out the FV, Blink Bravely volunteed
Oh those 18BBL Fermenters have a ladder Inside! We then Got Carl to Dig out the Mash Tun
Once the FV was clean and we had boiled off the extra wort . . . plus adding the 8.8Kg of Fuggles for bittering and 2.2Kg of Goldings for Flavour we ran off the bitter wort to the FV
Phil had brewed 6BBL of mild on Monday, which was going to provide the yeast for the Simmonds Bitter . . .which mean it needed to be skimmed . . . as its a 6BBL brew in an 18BBL fermenter we needed a custom Skimming gadget to actually skim the yeast.
Which gave us 10Kg of nice yeast barm to pitch into the Simmonds
So here it is 14BBL at 1.057
