AG No.3 Bohemian Pils

[Greenhorn]

Today is brew day for my Get er brewed Bohemian Pilsner kit.

They annoyingly don't say what any of the amounts of the ingredients are, which seems kind of fundamental....

It's a lovely day so I thought I'd spare the kitchen and brew in the garden.

This is the debut for my new mash tun and boiler so it should be interesting.


I weighed the Bohemian Pils malt at 4kg so heated 12L of water to 75°c in order to hopefully hit 68°c in the mash. For some reason it only came in at 64°c so I used my step calculator and added 1.7L of boiling water which got it to bang on 68°c.

Mashed for 60 minutes and added about 6 L of near boiling water to raise the temp to 77°c for sparging.

My manifold sparged well apart from being really slow. About 0.25L per minute. But it cleared up beautifully and was coming out crystal clear.


I've just finished the sparge and got 15L of my 30L total, which seems a huge loss to the mash and evaporation. But the Tesco Ashbeck water is only 20p a litre so I'm not too bothered.

The boiler is on and I'll be doing a 90 minute boil.

as I go I'll find out how how big the 4 Saaz hop additions are. I can't really weigh them while they're in their vacpacks. And Get er brewed don't say the AAs, so I'm going to have to guess the IBUs.

i'll keep you posted.

 

[Greenhorn]

Jesus. Massive and fast boilover.



Thankfully I managed to pull the plug just before it got covered in hot beer and would have tripped the fuses at the very least.

And that is precisely why I'm developing the element covers.

Boiling nicely on the one other element now.

 

[Greenhorn]

So, first hop addition at 60min is 45g. And I'm very impressed that they come in a very neat teabag, so no **** to filter out.

 

[Greenhorn]

I've drained and weighed the mash. After I'd got down to a gravity of 1.04 I stopped sparging. I then drained 6L from the tun and the mash weighed 8kg. Minus the 4kg of the grain leaves me with a total of 10L water remaining. So Given that I started with 30L and got 15L of wort, that's 5L I lost to evaporation during the mash and sparge.

no idea how that compares to other peoples' experience. I think doing it outside on a breezy day hasn't helped.

 

[Greenhorn]

The other hop additions were 55g @ 30min, 25g @ 10min and 25g @ shutdown.

It's now cooling. All seemed to go well.

The wort OG was 1.053, which on the 15L I got from the boil, gives me an efficiency of about 65%. This is a little disappointing given my nice slow sparge. But it's my first proper mash, so hopefully it'll improve.

 

[Leon103]

I guess they don't tell you the weight of the hops so the recipes aren't copied. That's hell of a loss though.

 

[Greenhorn]

I guess they don't tell you the weight of the hops so the recipes aren't copied. That's hell of a loss though.

Given that this beer style is pretty specific, espcially regarding the hops, i can't really see that they'd not say what the AAs are out of secrecy. Probably they just couldn't be bothered.

loss of what, efficiency or water usage?

I think some of the efficiency will have been down to the fact that the mast temp dropped prior to sparging. My manifold is only loose fitted where it meets the tank connector and the weight of the mash pushed the side of the cooler out enough for the manifold to disconnect. It was too hot for me to just stick my hand in, so I had to tip it all out into a big pan to fix it. It was a big metal pan and the temp dropped quite significantly. So I don't think I managed to rinse the grain very well.

 

[cheapbrew]

sounds like it went reasonably well apart from the boil over, at least it was outside and not on the kitchen stovetop, and nice clear wort :thumb:

 

[Greenhorn]

Yeah, I couldn't believe how clear it was coming out.

 

[Leon103]

Given that this beer style is pretty specific, espcially regarding the hops, i can't really see that they'd not say what the AAs are out of secrecy. Probably they just couldn't be bothered.

loss of what, efficiency or water usage?

I think some of the efficiency will have been down to the fact that the mast temp dropped prior to sparging. My manifold is only loose fitted where it meets the tank connector and the weight of the mash pushed the side of the cooler out enough for the manifold to disconnect. It was too hot for me to just stick my hand in, so I had to tip it all out into a big pan to fix it. It was a big metal pan and the temp dropped quite significantly. So I don't think I managed to rinse the grain very well.

Sorry water loss.

 

[Hops_and_Dreams]

I also got an AG kit from geterbrewed, did smile to myself at the comprehensive instructions of 'mash at Xc for Xmins' written on the mystery bag of grains.

 

[Greenhorn]

It's spent the last two weeks gently bubbling away in the brew fridge and has dropped from .048 to .020, so today I reset the temp to 19 for the diacetyl rest.

Doing a proper AG with all the bits and bobs is very exciting.....

 

[Leon103]

Going to keg mine tomorrow it's been 4 weeks in the fv now. One week resting at 18.5.

Was down to 1.011 a week ago

 

[Greenhorn]

The Pils was racked into three 5L water bottles and is now conditioning in the fridge at a balmy 2°c.



I took a small sample and even though it's flat and a bit rough around the edges, it's clear that it's going to be awesome.

roll on the end of June.

 

[Leon103]

That seems a lot darker than my attempt.

 

[Covrich]

That does look very dark for a pilsner, but could be the funny lighting on the camera

 

[cheapbrew]

yeah its a lot darker than the wort pics above?

 

[Greenhorn]

It's not actually.

Have you never noticed that a large volume of beer is a lot darker than a pint, or measuring cylinder. Exactly like deep water is darker than a bathful.

When I syphoned a bit out for sampling, it was pale as anything. Much like Urquall in fact.

 

[Greenhorn]

In fact, you can see on the middle bottle, the airlock has beer in it from when I moved it slightly overfilled and it blew. Very pale.

 

[cheapbrew]

yeah it looks better in the airlock :thumb: