Nice all grain english ipa

[Tony1951]

Last week I knocked out a pretty standard English IPA style beer - big grain bill and big body. I tasted the sample jar this morning after a week fermenting with Gervin Ale yeast at about 20c. REALLY pleased with what is developing.

Here's the recipe and method with mashing (no bag) in my Ace boiler.

THE MASH

6kg Weyermann's Pale Ale Malt (Geterbrewed 26 quid for 25kg)
150 grammes Crystal Malt.

Mashed in 15 litres of water at 78C strike temperature (turns into about 68C in the mash when stirred in,

The mash was left for an hour and five minutes and then drained into a clean FV waiting under the boiler.

Two sparges: First with 10litres of 75C water poured over grains and stirred periodically for fifteen mins. Then another 8 litres at 75C for five minutes - stirred.

The wort came through the filter nice and clean and I then took a few minutes to empty the grain into my compost bin and swill it out a few times to leave the boiler clean and tidy inside.

THE BOIL.

After the mash I had about 27litres of wort after the process which is too much to fit in the boiler so I decanted about 25 litres to the boiler and switched on the element and put the rest into the 12l stockpot on the stove top. I would use this stock pot wort for topping off the boiler as evaporation reduced the brew. The topping up wort was of course boiled the same amount of time as the main brew.

At 60 mins I added 38gm progress
At 15 minutes I added 36gm EKG
At flame out I added 36 gm EKG stirred it in and rapidly reduced the temperature to 80c

I steeped the hops at 80C for half an hour and then cooled to 20C.

The initial gravity was 1066, but because I had a minor boilover near the end of the boil and had lost about 2 litres while I was getting gear from the house, I topped off with 2 litres of boiled water which reduced my OG to 1060.


FERMENTATION

Pitched a pack of Gervin Ale Yeast which I believe is just Nottingham under a proprietary brand

Maintained a temperature between 18 and 22C, mostly at 20c but it occasionally dropped a bit lower during the night.

At DAY 7 the gravity had reduced to 1016 which makes the brew 5.8 abv already and I expect it to reduce further over the next week.

On tasting the trial jar I am well pleased. Great big flavour, and nice big beer mouth feel. This could well reduce if it attenuates more over the next week which it well might, but the beer is very much to my taste.

REALLY looking forward to trying this in about a months time after about three weeks in the bottle. I have 23 litres and very little trub so I'm probably going to get about 44, 500ml bottles out of it. Cost under a tenner.

 

[Tony1951]

I made this recipe again today with a tiny change to the hopping. I used 22 grammes of Magnum this time for bittering instead of 38 grammes of Progress because I had run out of the Progress.

Everything else was identical and using the boiler 'bare back' without the bag I was able to get 78% efficiency. I think the sparge is much better and it literally takes two minutes to empty out the grains and rise out the boiler with a hose a couple of times to get rid of the odd stubborn grain which hangs around for a couple of swills.

The OG is 1066 with 23 litres in the FV. Now I'm just waiting for the yeast to get going. Should be going by tomorrow.

I have now got my stocks of beer back where I want them - 110, 500ml bottles of APA and IPA and the new brew will probably run to about another 42 in a fortnight. My sons staged a sort of Viking raid on the place at Christmas and just about cleared me out the beggars... :)

 

[Leon103]

Doesn't the grain block the tap?

 

[Tony1951]

Doesn't the grain block the tap?

No Leon, it works well at that stage. The boiler has a sort of mesh tube filter attached to the tap and This week I had a blockage after the boil but last week it all ran out fine after the boil. The difference I think was I used pellet hops this time. Can't think of any other recipe change to account for the post boil clogging.

With the mesh filter at the mash stage, it works just like a mash tun.

I mashed for an hour with 6.150KG of grain and 15 litres of mash water. Then drained into a clean FV under the boiler. The first runnings were cloudy and were put back into the boiler. After draining about 9 litres, I sparged with 10 litres of 75C sparge water and stirred up the boiler to fluidise the grains in the sparge. Waited ten minutes, drained it and did it again with about 8 litres. By the end the runnings were quite light in sugars - weak really, but post boil I still got 23 litres at 1.066 ready for the fermentor. That is 78% brewhouse efficiency according to the Brewer's Friend calculator.

 

[Leon103]

I may try it for my next brew. I have a hop filter(copper pipe) which should have the same effect

 

[Tony1951]

A few times when my filter blocked I just baled the lot into the FV and fermented it. Worked fine, I just ended up with about an inch and half of trub, Careful syphoning gets around that. The beer has in my opinion been fine.

Hope it works for you. If in doubt make a small brew so you don't lose much if you don't like it. You do need somewhere to shake out the grains and hose out the boiler. If it is an electric one like mine, you obviously have to take care about the switches and places where water could get into the electrics. Another advantage is that you don't get that horrible dripping bag to move out of the boiler, and if you are making big brews like mine with 6kg of grain and 6 litres of retained water - all steaming hot, you don't have to lift it out and hold it suspended. Works for me anyway. Maybe not everybody's cup of tea, if I can use that expression on this forum.

Cheers

 

[Leon103]

I use a pulley to remove the bag. Works a treat and I noticed the efficiency difference when I didn't do it at the weekend because j was brewing indoors

 

[Tony1951]

I use a pulley to remove the bag. Works a treat and I noticed the efficiency difference when I didn't do it at the weekend because j was brewing indoors

Do you mean the brew house efficiency went up or down and what did you do differently. Sorry - not sure what you did.

I like trying different ways of doing things to see what works and what doesn't.

 

[Leon103]

I usually use a pulley to remove the bag, let it drain over the boile. It's easier to handle and I get loads of wort out of the bag. I then use the pulley to bunk sparge and again let it drain. Doing that I hit at least 72%. This weekend I was brewing in the kitchen so couldn't use the pulley and didn't hit the efficiency target

 

[Tony1951]

My English IPA brew of last week (21st Jan - 8 days ago was OG 1066 and is now at 1010. It is 7.5% abv now and about 78% efficiency achieved by mashing directly in the boiler with no bag with 23 litres in teh FV. It has a great malty and splendid hoppy taste even going on the gravity sample. I'll leave it the full fortnight and bottle it next Wednesday probably. It should finish in teh bottle at about 7.7% so I will need to treat it with caution when drinking it. I don't want to turn into a sot after all.

The recipe is as follows:

6KG pale malt (I used weyermanns pale ale).
0.150 kg crystal malt.

Mashed at 67C starting temperature in 15l of mash water for one hour with two sparges of 10l and 8l at 75C, stirred into grain in the boiler, left for ten minutes and drained out of the tap into a storage vessel (FV) before being returned to the cleaned boiler for the boil.

HOPS:

22g Magnum Pellets @ 60 mins
37g East Kent Goldings @ 15 mins
37g East Kent Goldings @ 0 mins

Cool rapidly to 80C at turn off. Leave there for 30 minutes and cool to pitching temperature rapidly.

Pitch 11 grammes of rehydrated Nottingham Yeast @ 20C.

Ferment at about 20C.

Brilliant flavour and mind blowing potency. I could feel the buzz five minutes after drinking the trial jar.

:)