mikem
Brewing Noob
This christmas I decided to throw myself into the deep end of beer brewing by jumping straight in with a full mash brew last week.
Had a lot of fun doing it but a few problems and am now not conviced I'm going to have anything worthy of drinking. This is mostly based on the colour of the fermenting wort (very light although it was a lager malt with 3.9EBC so perhaps not the end of the world) but also because my gravity is down to 1010 after only a week and 2 days. Any thoughts on whether I should persevere with another 4 weeks of fermentation and bottling. I'll give a bit of a rundown of my process to help with the "fault finding".
The mash seemed to go well enough - temperature at start was 68 and finished at about 66 after an hour and a half.
The sparge wasn't so good. I didn't really get a great setup and am not convinced the temperature of the sparge water was hot enough - temperature of final wort was only 58.
The boil was where I really felt things went wrong. I have a brand new Brupack boiler but other than when it was full on boil it never seemed to get a "rolling boil going" . I ended up running it for an hour and 10 mins but not sure how long during this process it was actually boiling.
After that things went reasonably smoothly. The chilled wort has been at a controlled temperature for a week and 2 days now and initially seemed to be fermenting away nicely but now I'm not so sure.
Had a lot of fun doing it but a few problems and am now not conviced I'm going to have anything worthy of drinking. This is mostly based on the colour of the fermenting wort (very light although it was a lager malt with 3.9EBC so perhaps not the end of the world) but also because my gravity is down to 1010 after only a week and 2 days. Any thoughts on whether I should persevere with another 4 weeks of fermentation and bottling. I'll give a bit of a rundown of my process to help with the "fault finding".
The mash seemed to go well enough - temperature at start was 68 and finished at about 66 after an hour and a half.
The sparge wasn't so good. I didn't really get a great setup and am not convinced the temperature of the sparge water was hot enough - temperature of final wort was only 58.
The boil was where I really felt things went wrong. I have a brand new Brupack boiler but other than when it was full on boil it never seemed to get a "rolling boil going" . I ended up running it for an hour and 10 mins but not sure how long during this process it was actually boiling.
After that things went reasonably smoothly. The chilled wort has been at a controlled temperature for a week and 2 days now and initially seemed to be fermenting away nicely but now I'm not so sure.
