Back to Basics 2 - the 80 shilling kitchen special

[BigYin]

Grain - Pale, a splash of crystal and a splash of black malt

Not sure I'll need all 3 pans, but we'll see

checking the mash water temp

Doughing in

a bit under target temperature

added some water from the kettle, and a good stir with a plastic salad server to evenly distribute the water

The high tech 'active insulation' mash tun - i.e. a pan in the oven!

Brew day treat - bacon sarnie and espresso :mrgreen:

Just waiting for the mash to complete now... then the fun starts! :lol:

 

[rich27500]

Good start will follow this with interest

 

[BigYin]

Mash over, ready to sparge

Using a steamer pan raised up on wooden spoons I first created a stable layer of grain to act as the filter bed

then carefully added the rest of the mash

Carefully fly sparging

Sparge all done, nice full pot of wort, ready for the boil

 

[PD]

looking good enough to eat.

 

[BigYin]

Plenty of Whitbread Golding Variety hops to start with

Quickly up to the boil - the advantage of a big gas burner and a much smaller batch size

 

[BigYin]

After the boil, chilling in the sink

A lakeland plastics muslin square from jam making, a few clothes pegs and a steamer make the filter that will hopefully keep the cold break and hops out of the beer heading for the demijohn

slow going, but looking at all that cold break material, worthwhile :mrgreen:

 

[TRXnMe]

Looking good there, fun doing it the simple way isn't it?

 

[BigYin]

Ok, so the muslin cloth was fine, apart from the last wee bit, which slowed down so badly I eventually gathered the muslin up and squeezed the wort through it - so probably quite a lot of break material has ended up in the brew :lol: :whistle:

Putting in a bit of effort with a whisk to aerate the wort and mix in the yeast

4 litres at 1.050 all tucked up in a nice clean demijohn :mrgreen:

 

[BigYin]

After an hour it's starting to separate out nicely

And after 2 hours it's even clearer

 

[EskiBrew]

Nice work :clap: :thumb:

 

[BigYin]

cheers Mr Eskimo :

24 hours later the break material is still up at the top, now with a fair amount of foam. It's got a full sachet of Windsor yeast in it, and although it started off very quickly it's been constant rather than violent, no bad thing really

 

[Andyhull]

You make it look so easy easy.
Looks nice and dark too!

 

[BigYin]

You make it look so easy easy.

:lol: Too kind - but actually, it IS really easy :mrgreen:

I guess that's the main drive behind this challenge - to show just how easy it really can be to brew beer :

 

[TRXnMe]

You make it look so easy easy.
Looks nice and dark too!

Yes, he does, but as he said above, it is that easy

I had a go myself, never even done an extract before, only kits with a few addons. Apart from a muck up due to not remembering what type of malt I wanted (crystal malt isn't the same as pale malt yno ) it went swimmingly, so much so I've done another one since and am buildinng up the kit to do much larger AG brews :)

 

[The Goatreich]

After chatting to TRX on the weekend I'm now really interested in doing one gallon batches to try out brews and the scale them up to 5 gallons for the ones that are the most popular. It seems a good way to get lots of different brews done.

Presumably in a clear DJ you need to keep it in the dark to avoid hop skunking?

 

[TRXnMe]

OK, I'd never heard of hop skunking until just now, done a bit of reading on it and then went and sniffed the cherry beer I've had in clear demi johns for the last 3 weeks.

:pray: No sulphur smell :thumb: : :party:

It's not been specifically kept in the dark, it's in my hallway. There are no windows into the hall, so any light it gets is either electric (not much, I'm too tight to pay the electric bill) or reflected.

FWIW the hops used in it were Youngs Fuggles.

 

[BigYin]

Just bottled this - got 7 bottles out of it, at 4.6% :drink: :drink:

 

[BigYin]

Here we are :mrgreen:

 

[abeyptfc]

looking good mike, although the labels could be less creased! I think you should be deducted points for that!

 

[BigYin]

pedant