Recent content by rank_frank

I get it as cold as I can, around 0°C. Hold it there for 24-48 hours then add ½ teaspoon of gelatine dissolved in 100 ml of hot water and hold there for another 48 hours. Then keg and pressurise.

I have found the same but, in the last hosepipe ban 2 summers ago, I switched to no-chill and have noticed no difference to the beer. I just need to reduce my electricity usage now. A brew day is very obvious on the smart meter

I've no idea if that is really a Gales yeast but I did use it in a Porter in November. It fermented hard for 2 days and is the first fermentation that I've had to refrigerate to stop it running away under its own heat. The end result is very tasty too.

I think the point is to raise the temperature to make things go quickly but increase the pressure to keep things clean. Usually done with lager yeasts used at room temperature. Not all yeasts respond well to this treatment.

Well done for getting the first brew done. In your original post you were trying to work out a method for heating sparge water. I heat mine in the Grainfather prior to doing the mash. I heat it to around 87C and then run it off to a spare fermentation bucket and start heating the mash water. By...

I've got an older Grainfather Connect. I think it'd be called the G30 nowadays. It has got a hop filter and copes very well with leaf hops but pellets have been a pain. I have struggled with using a spider as it fills with sludge and I get very little hop utilisation. After stripping and...

I'm in

I've reused S-04 and W34/70 both with good results. The S-04 was an existing yeast cake that I repitched onto whilst the W34/70 was stored for a couple of weeks in kilner jars in the fridge. I'd do it more often but I don't brew regularly enough to make it worthwhile.

I wouldn't normally put jam into a beer because the pectin that's binding it together isn't going to help with clarity. However, this is a porter so that might not matter to you so add it in.

Congratulations. I've had mine for a couple of years now. I also have the micro pipework but not the Graincoat. The only time I wished I had that was last winter as I brew outside and it was way below zero, the Grainfather was struggling to get a rolling boil. Normally it's fine. There's no...

if the mesh of the hop basket is fine enough then you can use one for pellets no problem. In fact that's exactly what I do when using pellets with my Grainfather. I find that I don't need to use it when using whole leaf hops as the built in filter is good enough for them. The only thing is that...

Camden Hells from The Camden brewery, Korev from St Austell, Frontier from Fullers and Tarka Four from Otter are 4 that I've had and hit the mark, particularly over the last hot summer

I tend to use to use 65C for 60 minutes and 75C for 10 minutes.

well it depends on the nature of the kit. If the hops are separate and need to be boiled then you can use your GF for that but if the extract has been pre-hopped then, as bigcol49 says, it doesn't need boiling. The instructions that come with the kit should make it clear what you need to do.

I think you'd need quite a few of them to take wort from 100C to 18C. Something else I'd worry about is the plastic they're made of. It's not meant to be heated to 100C as it would be when you first drop the block in. Whilst it would probably not melt it might distort and might give off...