A good day today, bottled up my weizenbock, 17.5l into various sized bottles, 70g sugar into 200mls water, tasted lovely and I had a near enough a pint of it out of the FV at lunchtime. Sweet but not cloying with a hint of banana, I imagine this will be nice when carbonated. Finished up at around 1014 which makes it 6.8%.
Meanwhile after chatting to
@JonBrew on another thread I decided to brew a 10l Fig Stout and a 10l rum &raisin.
Using parts of my belgian stout and the forum xmas stout recipe I went with
4kg Otter
120g caramalt
200g light crystal
400g chocolate
200g special W
400g oats
80g roasted barley
I mashed in for an hour at around 68c
Sparged in the loosest possible way and started the boil, realised I had way too much liquid in the klarstein I drew off 1l and boiled for an 90mins to boil some of it off, ended up pouring back that litre later in the boil
25g Magnum @60
200g Brown sugar & 200g Lactose @15.
The OG was 1066, the sample I had... well I may have overdone it with the oats & lactose it was like drinking a smoothie! Hopefully the carbonation and alcohol will sort that out.
Cooled it quite quickly, groundwater temp has really dropped in the last week or two. Poured roughly 10l into each fermenter and pitched half a pack of CML Midland into each. Hopefully half a pack will be ok.
I plan to use a big old gin bottle fill it up with raisins and then pour in enough rum to cover, the raisins will then go into one of the fermenters in a week or so along with maybe 100mls of the rum. I will roast the figs for roughly 20 mins or until they look like they are cooking and squeeze them into the other fermenter after a week or so. I haven't figured out amounts yet.... I think i'll come to that when I come to do it and see it there in front of me. I presume the figs will drop to the bottom eventually, I know when I used raisins in a mead they dropped after 2 weeks or so.
)
