Kentish Dreamer dark ale

[craft_ales_project]

So I harvested my first year hop crop yesterday, aprox 80% East Kent, and the rest a mix of Hersbrucker & Progress. I decided to coincide it with a brew day, and use around half of the 810g yield. So far so good... The recipe was (my own experimentation):
Mash vol: 23l

Sparge vol: 10l
Pre boil volume:
Mash SG:
Mash time @ 67c 1 hour/15 minutes @78c
Grain bill:
2500g Simpsons Premium English Caramalt (crushed)
1500g TF Crystal Malt (crushed)
500g Crisp Extra dark crystal malt (crushed)
500g Warminster Flaked Malted oats (crushed)

Hops:
1st hop 60 mins: 100g Challenger
15 mins ½ protofloc tablet
2nd hop 10 mins: 200g East Kent
3rd hop 5 mins: 200g East Kent green hop harvest 2020
Yeast: wyeast 1098 British Ale
My limited experience showed up when the 'English bitter' recipe I had surmised looked and smelt like a good stout!! Anyways, not to be perturbed I mashed the grains as per my usual combo, duly sparged the wort after 1 hour 15 mins and proceeded to boil. The mash got to around 98c before the thermal cutout on my Klarstein Mundschenk brew kettle cut the power. Unperturbed I reset the controller and proceeded with the boil, only to experience the same issue some few minutes later. Subsequent attempts to reboil failed, so all I could do was to just about hold 90c constantly resetting the device!
Needlessly to say this was most frustrating, ironically this brew's grain bill was probably the most expensive to date, but isn't that always the way?

So I went on to transfer the liquor to the FV, the tap got blocked, then the syphon failed me! So I just picked the whole shebang up manfully and poured it in! The temp was around 45c, as I'd given up the will to live by then and decided to wait until the next day (today Sunday) to pitch the yeast.
My questions are; what are the odds of it turning into a brew of note, and what did I do wrong to anger the green man?! There must be a ritual with hop picking to ward off ancient spirits of the hop world?

In the cold light of day, I'm pretty certain the faulty part is the thermal cutout component, so I've ordered a couple of new ones for a few quid, fingers crossed!

 

[Zephyr259]

The hops look great, hopefully you get a good flavour from them. However, I have to ask about that grain bill, your base malt seems to be Caramalt rather than a pale malt? Hopefully a typo but the use of such a specific name makes me think it's not. So you've got 4.5 kg of various crystal malts and 500 g of oats. It'll be interesting to see how this ferments since none of your malts have any enzymes.

 

[simon12]

Sort of like Zephr said you want around 80-90% pale malt (for a good beer), or 50% absolute minimum (to get something to ferment). I do like alot of crystal malt but over 15% is to much for me.

 

[craft_ales_project]

Hi guys! THanks for your comments, I take them on board. I wasn't aware of the enzyme factor, as I say I'm new to brewing from the grain. The beer appears to be fermenting at any rate, I was more concerned about the boil failure to be honest, hadn't considered the chemistry too much. On a brighter note, I fixed the faulty thermal cut-out, very cheaply as it turned out, and the vessel now holds a 100c boil. The results may be inconclusive because of this, as the lack of boil-off may affect things to the detriment, we'll have to wait and see! The seller Hi-Fi Tower Gmb did offer a free return/warranty repair, just to clarify, so fair play to them.

 

[Zephyr259]

The lack of boil shouldn't be a disaster as some beers don't get boiled and you got it hot enough to kill any bugs. Otherwise you'll just have more wort at a lower gravity than intended.

I have to ask, you said you sparged then got the mash up to a boil? Presume you mean wort here, but someone else here did boil the grains recently.

The main issue with only having crystal malts is your final gravity may be very high. Should still be drinkable. Will be interesting to see what happens.

 

[craft_ales_project]

Yes, my bad, I mean the wort!