(Pictures May Follow)
A group of like minded (crazy) craft brewers met up at Wibblers Brewery in Essex this weekend for a few beers and to brew a batch of beer for Wibblers October/November one of special beers. I can't help thinking that Phil made a bit of a mistake when he said "lets see just how much we can get into the mash tun" . . . The total capacity is a tad over 2000L (2023L if you are that interested) . . . Nice challenge :party:
After a bit of serious thought on the Thursday evening (aided and abetted by a long quality control session) came up with this as the grist.
95% Pale Malt
2% Dark Crystal Malt (400L)
1% Amber Malt
1% Wheat Malt
0.5% Carafa Chocolate Malt
0.5% Roast Barley
As the full volume of the mash tun will exceed the volume of the copper we decided to parti gyle it and take 4BBL (650L) of the first runnings, and brew a barley wine on the small plant, and whatever we managed to sparge from the remainder to make a small beer (at around 4.4%). . . . This also lead to the fact that we would have to do 2 boils on the small kit as the small copper is only 2BBL . . . Made coming up with the hopping interesting.
Mash Tun and HLT Grist Case Above Mash Tun
So brewday arrived :party: and we started loading the grist case . . . we had preloaded it with 10 Sacks the day before, so Phil started mashing in using his new hydrator . . . what could have been a chore was made relatively simple. In the meantime we crushed the Dark Crystal (14Kg), and the wheat Malt ( 7Kg) and loaded the dark malts (7Kg Amber and 3.5Kg Carafa Chocolate/3.5Kg Roast Barley) into the hopper, before tipping in the remaining 17 sacks of pale malt giving us a total of 675Kg of pale malt. . . . One snag here was that the grain auger couldn't transfer the grain from the hopper to the grist case, as fast as it left to end up in the mash tun. . . . So we had to stop to allow the Auger to catch up a couple of times. Still it was much easier than doing it by hand. . . . When it was all finally in the tun (Which actually required stirring and beating back to ensure that it stayed there :lol:) the mash was level with the top of the tun (Aim Achieved :party: ), and the lid was put on . . . This could present a challenge for sparging as the spiny sparge arm was 8" below the level of the top of the mash ) . . . Turned out we hit a Liquor to Grist ratio of 2.1L per Kg . . . In an acceptable range., should mean the first runnings will be about 1.090
Time for a beer
After the mash time was up we reconfigured the brewery to pump from the Under back into the Old FV and old Mash Tun (as a holding tank) . . . first runnings were 1.092 so fairly close to predicted.
And the first lot of hops (3Kg of Fuggles) was added, this was boiled for 90 minutes and we ran off the barley wine( OG 1.101), into the two FV's . . . before transferring the remaining 2BBL into the copper, on the spent hops, and adding a further 2Kg of fuggles . . .
. . . . After 45 minutes 2Kg of Brewers Gold were added for flavour, and at switch off we recirculated the wort (OG 1.105) while cooling to 80C before adding a Kilo of Goldings for aroma . . . Giving us a total of 8Kg of hops for the barley wine. . . . In order to recover as much extract as possible we sparged the hops to give us 3.3BBL (540L) at 1.095 . . . a bit lower than Phil wanted, but it should ferment well. . . . . Pitched with 8Kilo of yeast slurry.
In the meantime all was not well in the big brewery . :evil: . . . tbc
A group of like minded (crazy) craft brewers met up at Wibblers Brewery in Essex this weekend for a few beers and to brew a batch of beer for Wibblers October/November one of special beers. I can't help thinking that Phil made a bit of a mistake when he said "lets see just how much we can get into the mash tun" . . . The total capacity is a tad over 2000L (2023L if you are that interested) . . . Nice challenge :party:
After a bit of serious thought on the Thursday evening (aided and abetted by a long quality control session) came up with this as the grist.
95% Pale Malt
2% Dark Crystal Malt (400L)
1% Amber Malt
1% Wheat Malt
0.5% Carafa Chocolate Malt
0.5% Roast Barley
As the full volume of the mash tun will exceed the volume of the copper we decided to parti gyle it and take 4BBL (650L) of the first runnings, and brew a barley wine on the small plant, and whatever we managed to sparge from the remainder to make a small beer (at around 4.4%). . . . This also lead to the fact that we would have to do 2 boils on the small kit as the small copper is only 2BBL . . . Made coming up with the hopping interesting.
Mash Tun and HLT Grist Case Above Mash Tun
So brewday arrived :party: and we started loading the grist case . . . we had preloaded it with 10 Sacks the day before, so Phil started mashing in using his new hydrator . . . what could have been a chore was made relatively simple. In the meantime we crushed the Dark Crystal (14Kg), and the wheat Malt ( 7Kg) and loaded the dark malts (7Kg Amber and 3.5Kg Carafa Chocolate/3.5Kg Roast Barley) into the hopper, before tipping in the remaining 17 sacks of pale malt giving us a total of 675Kg of pale malt. . . . One snag here was that the grain auger couldn't transfer the grain from the hopper to the grist case, as fast as it left to end up in the mash tun. . . . So we had to stop to allow the Auger to catch up a couple of times. Still it was much easier than doing it by hand. . . . When it was all finally in the tun (Which actually required stirring and beating back to ensure that it stayed there :lol:) the mash was level with the top of the tun (Aim Achieved :party: ), and the lid was put on . . . This could present a challenge for sparging as the spiny sparge arm was 8" below the level of the top of the mash ) . . . Turned out we hit a Liquor to Grist ratio of 2.1L per Kg . . . In an acceptable range., should mean the first runnings will be about 1.090
Time for a beer
After the mash time was up we reconfigured the brewery to pump from the Under back into the Old FV and old Mash Tun (as a holding tank) . . . first runnings were 1.092 so fairly close to predicted.
And the first lot of hops (3Kg of Fuggles) was added, this was boiled for 90 minutes and we ran off the barley wine( OG 1.101), into the two FV's . . . before transferring the remaining 2BBL into the copper, on the spent hops, and adding a further 2Kg of fuggles . . .
. . . . After 45 minutes 2Kg of Brewers Gold were added for flavour, and at switch off we recirculated the wort (OG 1.105) while cooling to 80C before adding a Kilo of Goldings for aroma . . . Giving us a total of 8Kg of hops for the barley wine. . . . In order to recover as much extract as possible we sparged the hops to give us 3.3BBL (540L) at 1.095 . . . a bit lower than Phil wanted, but it should ferment well. . . . . Pitched with 8Kilo of yeast slurry.
In the meantime all was not well in the big brewery . :evil: . . . tbc