AG#10 Hop For Teacher

Had a brew day yesterday.

Had a nightmare with the mash temperature, strike water was 78, and the mash came out at 67C, so I added a bit of cold, which dropped it to 64C, so added more and more hot and ended up adding nearly 3 litres of extra mash water before managing to get the mash temp to 65.5C. I decided to stop there as I was getting frustrated and the mash was getting very watery.

Mash ended at 64C after 90 minutes and I experienced my first ever stuck mash, after sparging approximately 15l. I couldn't free it by blowing up the tap as I didn't have a hose that fits the mash tun tap, so I just turned the tap off, added all the remaining sparge water, stirred it up and waited 10 minutes before continuing, an impromptu batch sparge. It seemed to have worked as the OG was only two points above where it should have been, with a 1.5 litre loss.

The more observant among you may recognise the base recipe as SNPA. I'm intending to use this as a test brew, and depending how it turns out add more and more hops to the same recipe hopefully making a pungent APA as my house brew.

4.91KG - Maris Otter
110g - Crystal Malt
22g - Nugget 13% AA - 90 minutes
15g - Perle 10% AA - 15 minutes
30g - Cascade 8.2%/6.6% AA - 1 minute

Yeast from a local brewery
Bitterness - 37 IBU
Colour - 13.3 EBC

Pics:
Grains


HLT Water heating up


Doughing in


Mash tun all wrapped up


Hops, probably not enough


The unsuccessful fly sparge


First hop and water salt additions


Chiller and second load of hops in


Trying to chill faster by creating a whirlpool effect with the stirring spoon around the coils


1.054, which when corrected comes out as 1.052


Filling the FV and aerating the wort


Approximately 21.5l


All tucked up

Well rescued. Half fly, half batch sparge. You may have invented something there.

I take it you don't normally collect your wort from the MT via a tube. Are you not concerned about oxygenating it by dropping it into your collection vessel?

I never have used a tube from the mash tun, and it's something I'd like to rectify at some point. To do this I'll need to get a tap for the tun that I can stick some of Vossy's hose onto, perhaps I'll have a search on Ebay later today. I've read lots of opinions on here that hot side aeration is a load of b"*&£cks, but still having a tube would just rule it out totally. I've never noticed any bad flavours in the beers done this way though.


I think I'm going to stick to batch sparging for future brews. I seem to get the same efficiency, or even better sometimes, and it's just easier to control.

nice brew, hope it tastes gooooood!

Annoyingly this is still at 1.036 after 6 days in the FV, despite being at a reasonably constant 20C (approximately) in the FV. I had this problem with the last brew I did with this yeast and that took nearly 3 weeks to get down to a steady 1.008. I was planning to rack this off to secondary tomorrow, and dry hop with 65g of cascade, but I won't now it's still this high.

My main problem is that as of next Tuesday morning I'm away for just over a week, and I don't want to risk leaving this in the FV for that long. Does anyone see a problem with racking it off this weekend, keeping it in the water bath at approximately 20C until I get back, then doing the dry hopping and putting it in the shed for a couple of weeks before bottling? The latest I can really leave it to rack is Sunday night, which gives it only a few more days to drop a couple of OG points.

Decided I'm going to rack and dry hop this on Sunday night, leave it in the water batch at approximately 20C for the next 1.5 weeks, then when I get back it should be almost definitely finished fermenting, and off the majority of the dead yeast. I think that's the only way I can do it.