Definitely - so long as I can try out your stout recipe!This one was mine, glad you enjoyed it! I'd also love to steal your winter wassail recipe if I could, sounds delicious!
Below is my post about my 'not so secret' wassail brew, missing from this post is that when I measured the OG at the right temperature I had actually hit my OG hence the quoted ABV. If I was doing it again and having to work with leaf hops I wouldn't have used the hop spider at the whirlpool stage.
Anna
So I haven't written up this weekend past brewday which I really should before it get's too late and I forget. It wasn't my most organised day but I had a smack pack of Wyeast London ESB in the fridge and I was concerned about it being left too long, concerns that weren't helped by it hardly swelling over 5 hours after activating it. As I was holding the not very swollen pack willing it to miraculously expand in the few minutes before pitching I thought of my oh so careful pitching calculations with my lagers... felt a complete hypocrite... then poured it in thinking I'd give it 24 hours and see... I had some back up Lallemand London dry yeast just in case.
So the recipe was adapted from a book of American beer recipes I have.
That's the boring part... ok lessons learned from my first foray into water chemistry
1) After carefully measuring out the amounts of water mineral additions into a small IKEA bowl it's not a good idea to stand up quickly and knock them all over the floor (I didn't swear but was very tempted)
2) Brewfather's volume calculations are a bit naff. The volume of the mash was right at the top limit of the overflow pipe which really limited the recirculation rate. So we decided to go out for lunch and the mash was more like 2 1/2 hours which I think was a good thing.
3) The sparge was a tiny amount and it felt a real waste dumping all that nice grain that I wasn't convinced I'd got all the sugars out of that I'd have liked.
4) volumes in the boil off AGAIN! sheesh volume in the fermenter ended up being 21.5 litres and my OG down at 1.72 rather than 1.78 which means my efficiency was only about 2% off expected (Thanks to tea out and super long mash I think)
5) Full leaf hops are a pain - and I shouldn't have put them in the hop spider at whirlpool stage - felt a complete numpty for that.
So it's going to be 6.7% ABV I reckon which is a bit down from planned, probably not as bitter as hoped and a bit of a waste of good hops. Ho hum, putting it all down to the learning journey.
Oh one final thing ... fermenting with the London ESB yeast smells like baking parmesan and sun dried tomato bread . It's rather yum even if it is a bit confusing.
Anna