I found myself with some extra time today so I thought I would finally getting round to my first bbiab with the geterbrewed bitter to the end
As my water is rather hard I did some basic water treatment first kit.
using the calculator here. By basic, I just added half a campden tablet, CRS, gypsum and calcium chloride to the nearest g/ml.
Heating 26L water to 72 degrees gave me 66 when I added the grain which was spot on. After 20 minutes though my temperate was showing 69 so took a little bit of time trying to stabilise at 66. I insulated with an old winter coat and at the end of the hour I was down to 65.5 so pretty good.
Due to my equipment, I could only heat about 4L of (treated) water to 80 degrees for sparging, I just slowly poured that over the grain back into a fermenter and then added this to the boiler.
Boiling was fairly trivial apart from when the plastic light cover on the extractor decided to fall into the boiling wort
I tried fishing it out with my stirring spoon but quickly realised that wasn't happening so I had to leave it in there. Hopefully it won't have caused any problems
After an hour I then connected my cooler. The fittings it came with leak a bit but I managed by just sticking a pan underneath it. I was pleasantly surprised by how quick it took to cool it down to about 25 degrees.
OG was 1.042 so I will be a little under 4.7% but not massively so. I ended up with exactly 23L in the fermenter so that worked out rather nicely. I think from start to finish (including cleaning) was about 6 hours.
As my water is rather hard I did some basic water treatment first kit.
using the calculator here. By basic, I just added half a campden tablet, CRS, gypsum and calcium chloride to the nearest g/ml.
Heating 26L water to 72 degrees gave me 66 when I added the grain which was spot on. After 20 minutes though my temperate was showing 69 so took a little bit of time trying to stabilise at 66. I insulated with an old winter coat and at the end of the hour I was down to 65.5 so pretty good.
Due to my equipment, I could only heat about 4L of (treated) water to 80 degrees for sparging, I just slowly poured that over the grain back into a fermenter and then added this to the boiler.
Boiling was fairly trivial apart from when the plastic light cover on the extractor decided to fall into the boiling wort
I tried fishing it out with my stirring spoon but quickly realised that wasn't happening so I had to leave it in there. Hopefully it won't have caused any problemsAfter an hour I then connected my cooler. The fittings it came with leak a bit but I managed by just sticking a pan underneath it. I was pleasantly surprised by how quick it took to cool it down to about 25 degrees.
OG was 1.042 so I will be a little under 4.7% but not massively so. I ended up with exactly 23L in the fermenter so that worked out rather nicely. I think from start to finish (including cleaning) was about 6 hours.
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