Three day, brew day

OK. Let me know how you get on. My water is very different from yours but the principles are the same.

Will do Clibit :thumb:

Ok, so a bit more detail about 3DBD#2.

I put the mash on last night at 11.30. I was again aiming for a mash of 69C as I'm making a mild and want some body in the beer. Using the strike temp calc on Jims I heated the mash water up to 73.5 and after doughing in my mash temp was 68.6C so pretty accurate. Wrapped that bad boy up in towls, space blankets and a normal blanket and left it for 9 hours overnight. Mash Temp in the morning 60.7C. I again lost 8C overnight so my pot insulation is pretty consistant with 3DBD#1.

I yanked the bag out and rested it on top of the pot using a wire rack from my oven and left it for about half an hour/ forty mins (had some brekky and moderated some of you naughty forumites :ugeek:). Normally at this stage I have to start heating sparge water. But it was nice not to have to do so. I boiled the wort for an hour and added the bittering hops and will add the flavour hop late additons tommorow after the wort has cooled down.

I took a small sample of concentrated wort for a gravity reading. Because I hadn't sparged it was so concentrated it was like runny honey. Gravity reading 1.085 and 6L of extremely concentrated wort collected. Target OG 1.034. Put the figures into a dilution calculator and it came up with a brew length of 15L. So 8L short of my target brew length of 23L

3DBD#1 over shot target brewlength by 3.5L so I need to be aiming somwhere in the middle, between my usually 10.1L sparge (split into two dunk sparges 6.7L and .3.4L) and no sparge at all. I think with 3DBD#3 I will do just one dunk sparge of 6.7L to see what happens.

Overall I think doing a overnight mash/no sparge was partially successfull. I'm guessing doing a OM/NS would work much better with a full length brew as it seems I HAVE to do some sort of sparge with Maxi-BIAB because of the concentrated wort you make with this method. I think I might have to do a full lengh 5L brew experiment OM/NS to see if it works better with full length boils
Time wise, it took me about 3 hrs including clean up, but I tend too faff about quite a bit during clean up so other's might be able do it quicker. Overnight mashing defiately saves me time on brew day, as it takes about 40mins for my mash water to heat up on my hob and then I usually do a 40 min mash. So I get an hour 10 min saving.

Maybe I'll try an overnighter some time.

I'm very interested to hear how the late hopping goes after the wort has cooled overnight. How long will the late hops stay in the wort? At what sort of temperature?

Basically, what I do is take some wort from the main body on 3DBD day 3, about 3L for a 23L batch but I'm going to scale it down as I've only got 15L. Then boil it for 15mins and add the late hops at the 10 min mark as the reciepe states. Then just cool this 'micro boil' and chuck it in the main batch then aerate and pitch.

I did it for my ordinary bitter, two brews ago for the first time and it works really well. Previous to a discussion about late hoping/no chill with another forumite (think it was dad_of_jon) I was unaware of the effect no -chill has on late hops. It really seems to have brought the OB alive when in the past my pale ales/bitters were lacking because of this. We seem to have an increase of forum members who are no-chilling and also aren't aware of the the effect no-chill has on both the bittering additions and the late hops. I'm going to write a guide about it in a day or two

Why not add the 10 min hops during the first boil and then take them out?

I assumed you were going to steep the late hops in the wort at whatever temperature it was the next day? You could insulate the boiler after the 60 min boil and then chuck aroma hops in the next day? Steep for maybe 30 mins?

Because hop oils are volitile, the flavour/aroma additions get carried away with the steam whilst the wort is cooling down and all you end up with is the bittering addition.


Potentially I could insulate my pot again as all I lose is 8C over 9-11 hours during an overnigtht mash, so I guess I could wrap it up again and steep some hops the next day. Incidently the other way to get the late hop additions into the wort is to hop stand in this way. From what I've read a no chill hop addition at flame out is about the equavalent of a 20 min regular addition. I haven't read too much about this way of doing it as I really like the 'micro boil' way so far. It's really easy.

MyQul said:

Because hop oils are volitile, the flavour/aroma additions get carried away with the steam whilst the wort is cooling down and all you end up with is the bittering addition.


Potentially I could insulate my pot again as all I lose is 8C over 9-11 hours during an overnigtht mash, so I guess I could wrap it up again and steep some hops the next day. Incidently the other way to get the late hop additions into the wort is to hop stand in this way. From what I've read a no chill hop addition at flame out is about the equavalent of a 20 min regular addition. I haven't read too much about this way of doing it as I really like the 'micro boil' way so far. It's really easy.

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this is what I was suggesting, insulate the pot and add steeping hops the next day - this would lead to less evaporation of oils. And less time. If you steep at 80C the next day you wil get lots of oils and no IBUs, so you can determine the bitterness with the 60 min hops.

clibit said:

this is what I was suggesting, insulate the pot and add steeping hops the next day - this would lead to less evaporation of oils. And less time. If you steep at 80C the next day you wil get lots of oils and no IBUs, so you can determine the bitterness with the 60 min hops.

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Do steeping hops add flavour too, such as a 10 min addition in a regular addition?
The only thing is it would about 24 hours later so I don't know how much heat I will lose, it may have gone lower than 80C. Also it has to cool down from 80C to 20C so I can pitch the yeast which would need about another 12+ hours so it would end up being a 4DBD

Hmm... Maybe you could just do a hot steep after the 60 min boil? For 20-30 mins? You'd lose less oils than a ten minute boil I reckon.

But you do get flavour from steep hops. You get flavour from dry hops IMO. Ask anyone who dry hops kits.

Doing a 20-30 min hot steep I think would work, as mentioned in my brewday report earlier in the thread, if you add hops at flameout, for no chill this is supposed to be the equivalent of a 20 min regular hop addition

I can see where your coming from here btw - simply adding some steeping hops at some point would be easier that doing the microboil.

However for me it's not any harder or easier because on D3 after the wort is cooled I rack the wort off the trub into another FV before pitching the yeast. This is so I can harvest very clean yeast at bottling time with very little trub in it. So whilst I'm doing this I just to the micro boil at the same time

But doing some steeping hops would be interesting too, seeing as I'm doing lots of experimentation anyway

A lot of breweries don't add any hops during the boil because it's messy in large quantities - they add bittering hops to the kettle before the wort is transferred to the kettle from the mash tun, then they add aroma hops after the boil has finished and while the wort is transferred slowly to the FV via a heat exchanger, which takes 1 to 2 hours usually. The oils seep out of the hops in the hot wort and there is little evaporation. I've seen it done, and I've seen the film of oil on the surface of the wort in the kettle.

Wonder why the hop oils evaporate for us HBers then? Less sophisticated equipment? My ordinary bitter definatley benefited from doing the micro boil. Wonder whats going on then?

Nothing's going on I think. Evaporation happens with steam, reduce the steam and there's less evaporation. Hence the move by Microbreweries to steeping, hop stands, whirlpooling and using devices like hop rockets. Wort is passed though a hop rocket post boil on its way to the FV, and the heat and the flow extract the oils in an enclosed chamber. It's all about maximising the extraction and retention of hop oils. Adding hops to the boil within the last 15-20 minutes is good for fixing hop flavour, but post boil hopping seems be getting increasingly popular for brewers looking to maximise the aroma and flavour of hops in their beers. I'm not an expert, but this is what I'm finding out. I don't worry about it, I get great beer from late boil additions, I do post boil steeps sometimes, I dry hop sometimes. They all work well. It's fun experimenting and working out what works for me, and what is most practical and gets results I like.

Seeing as I'm doing so much experimentation at the moment I think I might have to have a go at post boil steeping/hop standing as it sounds like a really interesting concept.

Believe it or not I have never even dry hopped and I've been brewing for about 3 yrs now

clibit said:

Adding hops to the boil within the last 15-20 minutes is good for fixing hop flavour, but post boil hopping seems be getting increasingly popular for brewers looking to maximise the aroma and flavour of hops in their beers.

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This bit about post boil hops caught my eye there Clibit. Two brews ago, when I decided to use the second half of my Geterbrewed kit for an experiment, I had been chatting to Myqul about my intention to do a no chill brew. We decided that the zero minute hops should go in after the boil had finished because they would be held at a highish temperature far longer than the recipe expected.

Anyway, because I was brewing the half kit to 23 litres I decided I would need more hops and added an extra 20g of EKG and 10g of Citra to the cooling wort. This then gradually cooled over 23 hours to pitching temperature, when I emptied the boiler and went onto the next stage. This beer has a startlingly bright taste and smell. It really jumps out at you and I think its just about the best thing I made. It's only 3.1%ABV, but packed with flavour and aroma. I did also put 12g of Citra as dry hopping into the pressure barrel too, but I commonly do that and have never had this much flavour and smell, so I'm thinking the difference is down to the no steam steep.

I'm thinking in future I might do the same with the 20 minute additions. Why steam away the oils that contain the flavour and aroma?

From experience I think hops do different things to beer according to when they're added - nothing new in that statement! But what I mean is long boils add bitterness (but also some flavour in my experience), 30 min hops add bitterness and flavour, 20 - 0 min hops add mainly flavour and some aroma, post boil steep hops add flavour and aroma, dry hops add aroma and some flavour. I think we get hung up on flavour and aroma being entirely separate things - I don't think they are. Aroma oils affect our perception of the flavour, if not the actual flavour itself. And probably the flavour itself. So we can get quite different hop effects in our beers. And they are all good and all valid. You can tell when a beer has been dry hopped, it's very noticeable. You can tell when a beer has late boil additions, and when it doesn't. Steeping seems to be somewhere between late boil additions, and dry hopping, as you would expect, I guess. And I think it can be a very effective way of getting oils from the hops and not losing them. Hotter wort than dry hopping helps extract the oil, and the lack of boiling reduces the losses.

Tony1951 said:

This bit about post boil hops caught my eye there Clibit. Two brews ago, when I decided to use the second half of my Geterbrewed kit for an experiment, I had been chatting to Myqul about my intention to do a no chill brew. We decided that the zero minute hops should go in after the boil had finished because they would be held at a highish temperature far longer than the recipe expected.

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So what exactly did you do in the end. Put the zero minute hops in after it had cooled to 80C? Which thread was it? I don't remember, myself?

Yes - flavour and aroma are very much the same thing. People who have lost their sense of smell find that a huge amount of what they thought was 'taste' has been lost as well, because it was actually aroma they were experiencing alongside the sweet/sour/bitter/salty perception which is the real taste thing.

Check out this link:

http://scentsationaltechnologies.com/aroma.cfm

MyQul said:

So what exactly did you do in the end. Put the zero minute hops in after it had cooled to 80C? Which thread was it? I don't remember, myself?

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I'm trying to remember exactly. As I recall through the fog of three subsequent brews, I just switched off and stirred in the hops and put the lid on and left it. The main body of the brew was half of the Geterbrewed Real English IPA kit, but brewed to 22 or 23 litres and with an extra 20g EKG and 10g Citra dumped in at the end. It is very different to the other half of the brew which made a 7% IPA. That is a good beer too, but entirely different in flavour.