The Chaos that is a Buffers Brewery brew day

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Fermentation finished last Thursday with FG 1.011. Cold crashed until today then did a Closed Transfer, including adding priming sugar, to my King Keg. Bottled 2 litres in PET bottles for the library. Here’s the video, saves me writing how I did it.....
 
Five days into carbonation.....
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...pressure in the keg is rising up to 10 psi from 3psi where it started on Sunday, and......
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...PET bottle has recovered with gas over the beer. All looking good so far.
 
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..so this is my first tasting of the cascade pale ale I brewed back in November last year. Nice and clear with a pronounced citrus flavour bordering on lemon sherbet, the alcoholic type (5%ABV). The last cascade I brewed wasn't so in your face citrus. Is that right?
 
As an outdoors brewer, up until now, getting ready for brewday involved setting up a couple of trestle platforms from the back of the garage then transferring my kit from the garden shed. All-in-all, a lot of lifting and carrying before I could even get started with the clean down. All a bit tiring for an old buffer like me!

So, I decided to revamp my brewery.

With a couple of 3” square fence posts and 6” gravel boards, a box of 4mmx40 screws and 4 packets of castors from Screwfix, I set about making some trollies for my gas heated kettle/boiler, mash tun,

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HERMS tank and temporary storage tank (an FV).

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All the kit can now just be rolled out from the garage onto the patio and in minutes is ready for cleaning ready for brew day. Just as easy to put away as well! Looking forward to trying it all out next brew day athumb..
 
There is something rather delightful about your eclectic collection of equipment and repurposing, complete with a combination of shiny electrical switches, gaffer tape and industrial blue grey trolleys. It has a certain post apocalyptic chic ... loving your style 🤩.

Anna
 
Time to dry hop! I’m probably over-thinking it (again) but decided to take a leaf out of the Fermentasaurus users book and put the dry hops into the FV before fermentation started...so I came up with a plan. First, modify a supermarket net bag to fit 4 PTFE coated magnets
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Fill with dry hops, 100 grms Galaxy and 150 grms Citra in this case
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Without tying the bag closed, fold the top in and place the FV lid on top and secure bag on the underside of the lid with more magnets
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Carefully lift the lid, keeping it horizontal, and fit to FV AFTER pitching the yeast
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5 days on it’s time to remove the magnets to release the hop bag into the beer!
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Looking at the Krausen line the beer might have got to the hop pellets already!
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I’ll give it a couple of days and take first SG reading as fermentation bubbler is quiet.
 
Being a bit impatient with this one. Wanted to check how my first NEIPA was going so took first sample...
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I make that 1.014ish. Probably got another 3 or 4 points to go so I’ll leave it alone for another 3-4 days before I test again. But the good news is the TASTE and SMELL! They are totally on track. Looking forward to drinking this one!
 
Transferred my (first) NEIPA to a King Keg today (closed transfer into a KK full of CO2). Primed with 4 ozs of granulated sugar brought to the boil in 8 fl. ozs. of water. Transferred some of the beer from the KK into 3 PET bottles, squeezed to exclude the air. So far so good.
Inspected the fermentation bucket contents and think I might need to modify the hop bag and method for “next” time. As I suspected the krausen got to the dry hops under the lid, so weren’t dry for long and I think it was more a hop brick than pellets! I think this caused a bit of a problem when I was transferring the beer in that the float hit the hop brick that kept it above the surface and temporarily stopped the transfer. I little jiggle of the FV got it off and I was able to get the rest of the beer out without having to take the lid off.
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This is what the FV looked like after transfer. You can see the hop brick in the centre of the picture. Note the Krausen grot on the float!
 
After 10 days carbonating and 3 days in the barrelater I couldn’t wait any longer to try my first NEIPA....

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...first slurpings were OK for me, even served from a plastic pressure barrel athumb..
Lovely colour there. It'll be interesting to see when you get to the end of the keg, how its colour compares with one of your PET bottles.
 
What a lovely day for a brew day! Currently in the back garden mashing..










Simple recipe today. 4 kg pilsner and 300 grms carapils. Mashed in with 3 gallons of water. Yielded a little under 2 gallons of wort at 1.068. Just doing a second mash with 2.5 gallons of water for 30 minutes followed by another 30 minute mash.
Hops today, a new one for me, Kohatu.
Yeast, Verdant.
 
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