2nd AG BIAB - DIYDog Bracken's Porter

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M

mcphail

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For my 2nd AG, I wanted to try step up from a 10L to a 20L batch to see how I'd cope with my equipment (30L Burco boiler + BIAB setup). I wanted something a bit lower gravity than my first AG brew so I could drink a few at Hogmanay and to keep the grain bill sane. I looked for a porter recipe, and the DIYDog Bracken's Porter looked fun as I'm one of those weird people who like roasted barley.

Mash - 75 mins at 65C with water adjusted to London profile:
- 3630g Extra Pale Maris Otter
- 310g Roasted Barley
- 190g Dark Crystal
- 130g Black Malt
- Mash out 75C, vorlauf and sparge

Boil - 75 mins:
- FWH - 11g Vic Secret 16.7% AA (27.5 IBU)
- 15 min - protofloc
- 5 min - 12g Bramling Cross 7% AA (2.3 IBU)
- 5 min - 12g Challenger 6.5% AA (2.1 IBU)

Fermentation:
- Aerated with airstone
- Pitched 1 rehydrated pack of Crossmyloof US Pale Ale yeast at 19C

This was a messy one. The mash seemed to go well, and I kept my temperatures quite stable with a camping mat around my boiler and a duvet gaffer taped around the whole thing. The vorlauf went fine, but when I raised my bag higher to sparge I had all kinds of problems with the bag bulging over the side of the boiler and warm wort spilling everywhere. I don't know if I need to re-sew my bag to make it narrower to avoid this in the future (or just forget about sparging and simply top up with water).

The boil volume was 24.5 litres. I had no problems with boil-over, but I wouldn't want to be boiling any larger volume in this thing.

My boil-off calculations were well off on this one and I only had 18 litres into the FV. However, my OG was much higher than expected so I topped up to 20 litres giving an OG of 1.049 (target 1.046). I suspect my efficiency would have been even higher if I hadn't ended up with so much wort over the kitchen floor :) .

Fermentation seems to be going as quickly as expected with the Crossmyloof yeast and I'm down to 1.014 in 36 hours. I'm going to give this one about 3--4 weeks and may cold crash for a few days. I might experiment with gelatin for clarity before bottling.

Hopefully the first bottle should be ready for Hogmanay.
 

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