The Chaos that is a Buffers Brewery brew day

[Buffers brewery]

Well this shows the “stuck” brew on day 2 after being transferred to a PB with some priming sugar. Clearly, the yeast is still working. It will be interesting to see what the FG is when carbonation is finished.

 

[Buffers brewery]

Another brew day today. Got some rellies from California visiting in June so brewing a hazy West coast pale ale. Pinched the recipe from on here (@dave_77 ).
Bit of an "eventful" day and not in a good way. I've changed my process to pre-heat my water using my mash tun and HERMS tank. I set everything up last night but didn't notice one of the hoses was kinked so when I went out this morning the water was only 35C instead of 65C! Had to heat the strike water using the gas burner.
Anyway, got that sorted, added the grain to the empty mash tun..
4.2 kg Maris otter pale male
1 kg pilsner malt
400 grms Vienna malt
300 grms wheat malt

I wanted to get to mash temperature slowly so set strike water temperature to 65C and pumped it slowly in through the mash tun tap. Set the HERMS tank temperature to 68C to heat the mash up to 65C and keep it there. After an hour pumped the first runnings in to an empty fermentation bucket...

Managed to get around 1.5 gallons from 3 gallons of strike water. Second and third half hour mashes were uneventful and resulted in a little over 6.5 gallons of wort SG 1.046 going in the boiler.
Started the boil only to remember I needed to add some hops! I put it down to jet lag
Sorted the hops out...
10 grms Columbus @ 60 minutes
35 grms Columbus @ 15 minutes
1/2 protofloc tablet @ 15 minutes
... and one hour boil successfully completed.
Wort cooled to 80C and further hop addition..
50 grm Columbus
50 grm amarillo
and left for 15 minutes before chilling down to 25C. Gave it an hour to settle out a bit. Loaded up my dry hopper with
80 grm Amarillo
80 grm Citra
50 grm Columbus
and tried to attach the hopper to the underside of the fermentation bucket lid only to discover one of the magnets was missing (I had pinched it for one of my "projects" and forgot to return it). Fixed that . At the end of the hour transferred the wort to the fermentation bucket (SG 1.063) and added the rehydrated yeast, BRY 97. I'm never sure if it's really necessary to rehydrate some dried yeasts when others just get sprinkled across the top of the wort?
All now in the fridge set at 19C and bubbler connected. Gas collection starts tomorrow.

 

[Dutto]

It almost sounds familiar!

Good News - the finished brew will taste superb! (But you won’t dare repeat the process that created it!)
:hat:

 

[DocAnna]

That sounds quite a hard day's work, oh and proper credit due to putting that hop schedule together at a moment's notice .

 

[Buffers brewery]

That sounds quite a hard day's work, oh and proper credit due to putting that hop schedule together at a moment's notice .

Fortunately I had all the hops. They were just in the wrong place, a bit like my brain . Jet lag will be done in another day or two

 

[Buffers brewery]

2 weeks from brew day and fermentation is done.

I'll leave you to work out the ABV

Fridge turned down to 4C ready to transfer on Thursday.

 

[Buffers brewery]

Bit of a catch up post this. The West Coast IPA was primed with sugar solution and closed transferred to a PB. After a couple of days the pressure started to increase indicating carbonation was underway. I had a late thought and decided to bottle 3 litres (6 bottles) using the pressure in the barrel to dispense the beer into the bottles. As I expected there was a lot of froth so filled the bottles until foam started coming out. Removing the wand left an air space above the beer so I put some beer in a jug and used that to top up the bottles until foam reappeared then capped. Don't know if that'll work but time will tell.
On another subject, the Simcoe Amarillo pale ale I brewed at the end of March has today had it's first outing so I refer to it as my Jubilee brew. Purely coincidental.

 

[Buffers brewery]

So, there I was, 10 days after my first positive COVID test, still showing positive but assured by my kids that I wasn't contagious anymore, watching Dewbs & Co. on GBNews and I got a WhatsApp message from my son who was coming to stay for a couple of days and was due to arrive later that evening. "Can we do a brew day tomorrow?" he asked not knowing anything about what's involved in setting up my brewery for a brew day! "No" was my immediate reply. Then I thought about it....and changed my mind .

Didn't take many pics on the day as I was too busy telling my son what and how to do stuff as he wanted to be hands on and not just observe! Oh, and spent the rest of the time chatting and drinking..

Simple recipe, 4.5 kg Maris Otter pale malt, 450 grams Carapils, 10 grams each of Simcoe and cascade at 30 minutes, then 15 grams each Simcoe and cascade at 15 minutes and flame out. Chilled down to 23 ( which was good as it was 25 in the garden) and pitched one sachet of Verdant IPA yeast. Final gravity was 1.052

Brew now in the brew fridge set at 20C collecting brew gas.

 

[Buffers brewery]

Today is NEIPA day. My third attempt. Trying a slightly different method today and I've enlisted a bit of "help" from my old (yes, old .. he's the same age as me! ) uni mate who's visiting with his wife this past weekend. The two previous NEIPA attempts turned out pretty good but my brewhouse efficiency took a bit of a hit. I blamed the flaked oats that I just added in to the rest of the grain bill. This time I'm trying out a beta-glucan rest. Put all the oats (1.5 kgs) with an equal weight of pilsner malt in 1.5 gallons of water at 50C and left it for 20 minutes. While that was "doing" I mashed in the rest of the pilsner malt and Vienna malt in water at 67C. The oat/water mix was added to the main mash, stirred in and heated to 65C. I use a HERMS for my mash and have to say the grain drained much better than my previous brews so it would appear the B-G rest was effective in stopping the mash from gumming up. This is a pic of the oat mix being added to the mash...

Here's my "helper" doing a bit of mash stirring. He was always a bit of a stirrer!

Here we're transferring the first wort from the mash tun to a bucket..

Ended up after 2 further half hour mashes with around 7.5 gallons of wort. I boiled down to 6 gallons, added half a protofloc tab and boiled for a further 15 minutes, circulating the boiling wort through the pump and whirlpool pipe. 50 grms of both Simcoe and galaxy were added at flameout. Cooled down to 80C and left for 30 minutes before continuing cooling. Got down to 28C and left for an hour before transferring to a fermentation bucket. Decided it was still too warm to pitch the yeast so put the bucket of wort in the fermentation fridge set at 19C. I'll pitch the yeast tomorrow. Fair bit of trub left in the boiler...

..nice mound in the centre. I plan to rack the wort to another bucket before pitching the yeast tomorrow. It'll be interesting to see how much more trub settles out overnight.
OG 1.062

..tbc

 

[Buffers brewery]

After an overnight stay in the fridge to cool off, quite a bit of trub had settled out in the bottom of the bucket.

I prepared the fermentation bucket

and transferred the wort leaving most of the trub behind..

..and 2 or 3 pints of wort (so don't think I'll do that again)

Pitched the Verdant IPA yeast

Loaded the dry hoppers with 100 grams each of citra and galaxy

Closed the hoppers

Lid on

And back in the fridge. Gas collection pipe connected to the bucket lid

And bubbler connected.

I'll come back tomorrow and start collecting gas after fermentation has been going for a while.

 

[Baldbrewer]

great thread, those dry hoppers are begging to be automated lol
would be cool if a time sensitive signal could be sent from "brewfather" to wirelessly fire a solenoid/relay to open the dry hoppers!

sorry , just my brewery engineering geekiness getting carried away lol

 

[Buffers brewery]

great thread, those dry hoppers are begging to be automated lol
would be cool if a time sensitive signal could be sent from "brewfather" to wirelessly fire a solenoid/relay to open the dry hoppers!

sorry , just my brewery engineering geekiness getting carried away lol

Like your thinking @Baldbrewer ! My other hobby is model railways. I think I may have a couple of point motors that might do the trick. Not sure about the WIFI bit though

 

[RoomWithABrew]

Like your thinking @Baldbrewer ! My other hobby is model railways. I think I may have a couple of point motors that might do the trick. Not sure about the WIFI bit though

Brewpiless has the ability to trigger autospunding and this can be linked to SG from an ispindel, something to fiddle with, wiring is straightforward to trigger the auto spender.

 

[Buffers brewery]

Set the brewery up yesterday afternoon (before it started to rain) ready for today. Having cleaned everything I put 8 gallons of water in my kettle and added 64mls CRS and a crushed campden tablet. Gave it a good stir then transferred it all to my mash tun. Plugged the HERMS tank electrics and circulating pumps into a timer in the garage, set to turn ON at 6:00 am. By the time I was up and dressed (around 9:30 am ) the water was at 67C. A little bit of water juggling resulted in 3 gallons in my holding tank (my FB) and 5 gallons in the kettle. Grain put into the now empty but warm mash tun…

4kg Maris Otter pale malt
0.4kg Carapils
..added 0.6grm gypsum to the strike water in the holding tank before it was pumped back into the mash tun. A quick stir to get rid of any dough balls and started recirculating the wort through the HERMS tank to get the temperature back up to 65C.

After a one hour mash and two subsequent mimi-mashes, 6.7 gallons of wort ended up in the kettle ready for the boil. 7.5grm Epsom salts and 0.6grm gypsum were added to the wort as it heated to the boil. Once boiling, 5grm Ekuanot hops added for 60 minutes, 15grms for 15 minutes (together with half a protofloc tablet) and 30grms of hops at flame out. Today was the first outing of my over-complicated hop bag for the boil.

At the end of the cooling the bag was removed together with a fair bit of hop debris. I left the boiled wort to settle out for an hour and prepared the fermentation bucket with Chemsan solution.
Transferred the wort..

..5 gallons of SG 1.045…

…sprinkled the yeast, Safale US-05, over the surface of the wort, lid on and transferred to the brew fridge set at 20C.
I’ll return tomorrow to start collecting gas

 

[RoomWithABrew]

It all seemed to be going so well and then you had to stir it, by hand!!

 

[Buffers brewery]

I’m working on it

 

[Buffers brewery]

Couldn’t upload this yesterday, had to convert the MP4 to MOV file so it would play . This is my over-complicated hop bag during the boil. Reminds me of my mum boiling the net curtains in a “copper” before we had a washing machine!

 

[RoomWithABrew]

Couldn’t upload this yesterday, had to convert the MP4 to MOV file so it would play . This is my over-complicated hop bag during the boil. Reminds me of my mum boiling the net curtains in a “copper” before we had a washing machine!

View attachment 74845

And before television! But it kept you occupied.

 

[Buffers brewery]

Ekuanot pale ale is carbonating in the brew fridge set at 20C. Using my new Spundy to keep the pressure at 15 psi (depending on which gauge you read ).

 

[Buffers brewery]

First glass of the NEIPA I brewed back in August. It'll do