Fritz's Brewdays

[Fritzpoll85]

Now I'm settled in, I'll just post my brews into a single thread unless I'm doing anything odd/new!

Oatmeal Stout
Yesterday did a Jon Finch Oatmeal stout, but with the addition of 50g of Carafa Special II because I wanted it to be a bit darker. So the ingredients were:

4kg Crisp Pale Ale Malt
450g Oats
400g Crisp Crystal
400g Crisp Chocolate
200g Oat Husks
50g Carafa Special II

60g East Kent Goldings at 60min
1 pack of NBS Classic English Ale Yeast, which I rehydrated for a couple of hours before pitching.

Mashed at 67 degC to get a better body out of the beer, with a 75 degC mashout, and a 60min boil.

This was an odd brew because I've had these ingredients for ages - they were to let me brew with someone who wants to buy their own kit and wanted to see my AG setup, but then we've had 3 months of lockdown. So yesterday I set it all up outside and we had a socially-distanced homebrew!

In the excitement of having to occasionally grab an umbrella to protect the equipment, I forgot the water additions to change the alkalinity (though I remembered the sodium metabisulfate and CaCl). Bit annoying but it will mainly have affected the sparge, since my alk was 148ppm.

Target OG was 1.062. I seem to have hit 1.059 and it is now bubbling away at 19degC.

Here's a picture of the colour - it was like cola: black in bulk, but brown in thinner quantities. Will see how this pans out

 

[Fritzpoll85]

A day and a half on, and it's dropped to 1.022! Very active airlock yesterday, which has slowed down quite a bit. Rate it is going, I'll hit FG sometime this evening, but will probably let it sit for a couple of days once it's stopped fermenting

 

[Fritzpoll85]

It has very slowly drifted down to 1.018 and flattened off so I think I'm done. Going to leave it in there and then crash it down to 4 (all I can manage), then I'll gelatin fine it and bottle as this is a shared batch and my Helles is still on my only keg

 

[Fritzpoll85]

This was bottled a couple of weeks ago - carbonation is good. Coffee-like taste, but a little odd bitterness in the background aftertaste. Might need a couple of weeks to condition out? Next post will be forthcoming blue moon clone 'Blue Lunacy'

 

[Fritzpoll85]

Right, I have all the ingredients I need for about another 5 brews, so here's the next one I will be doing

Blue Lunacy
This is based off a recipe from an original brewer of Blue Moon - I've made some changes and added some Caramunich to try and hit the colour of the current Blue Moon, and wanted to make sure I got some orange flavour in from the peels so have bulked those out a bit. I think this is one I'll have to make a few times to get the spice additions correct.

Weyermann Bohemian Pilsner - 2.2kg
Weyermann Wheat Malt - 1.9kg
Flaked oats - 700g
Weyermann Caramunich II - 250g
Oat husks - 250g

Boil Additions:
Hallertauer Mittelfruh (AA 3.9%) - 20.5g at 60min
Coriander seeds (crushed) - 20g at 10min
Sweet orange peel (dried) - 57g at 5mins

Safale US-05 for the yeast - probably ferment at 18degC with two vials of Clarity Ferm (for gluten reduction)

Mash at 67 degC for 60mins, mashout at 75 degC for 10mins

 

[Fritzpoll85]

I have just filled my FV with the Blue Lunacy, though I lowered the orange to 45g and bumped the wheat up to 2.03kg (my 4 year old son helped and it went a bit awry!). Result looks a reasonable colour, and smells very orange though expect that to fade! Quite a lot of the spices seem to have ended up in the FV, but I'm okay with that.

My OG is 1.047, and this seems a bit low. I use the grainfather app to calculate the various numbers for all this, and tapping in an efficiency of around 75% seemed to work on my Helles - but anything with wheat in seems to fall quite short

For example, the app says I should have hit 1.057. So what am I doing wrong?

I treated the water (30ppm alkalinity fir the mash, 20pmm for the sparge) using the guide by @strange-steve. I stirred in thoroughly, I sparged.

The only thing I'm wondering is if the water calcs are wrong - 18L mash, 12L sparge on a 90minute boil. Or is the app just incorrect generally?

If this finishes around 1.008, it'll be just fine, but anyone got any thoughts?

 

[cushyno]

I had a couple of low efficiency batches with wheat until I started milling my own. Now consistently hit the 73-75% band with or without wheat malt.

 

[Fritzpoll85]

I had a couple of low efficiency batches with wheat until I started milling my own. Now consistently hit the 73-75% band with or without wheat malt.

Oh no - more equipment to buy!

I've seen similar elsewhere.

Meantime, the brew is still bubbling away now at 18C and has dropped from OG 1.047 to 1.011. Still some activity so will probably leave until next week. If it makes it to 1.009, I'll at least have a 5% drink

 

[Fritzpoll85]

Seems to have levelled off at 1.007 now - tastes very much like blue moon. Would folks here cold crash or not? There are still some particles in suspension, but I want to retain the overall haziness for this beer

 

[Fritzpoll85]

Decided to do a short cold crash and kegged for a week. Result is....

Pretty good! Compared to blue moon, probably a little less orange flavour, but still noticeable and a very smooth drinkable beer. Very pleased

Coming soon, a pumpkin ale....

 

[Fritzpoll85]

For a variety of reasons, I abandoned the pumpkin ale and have decided to continue my wheat beer obsession. The slate will be a normal hefe, a weizenbock and a dunkelweizen

First up the normal:

Fermentables:
3 kg - Wheat Malt Pale 3.9 EBC (55.1%)
1.8 kg - Bohemian Pilsner 4 EBC (33%)
400 g - Munich II 16.7 EBC (7.3%)
250 g - Melanoidin 59 EBC (4.6%)

Hops:
60 min - 27 g - Hallertauer Mittelfrueh

Yeast
1 pkg - Mangrove Jack's Bavarian Wheat Yeast M20

Mash Profile
43 °C - 20 min - Ferrulic Acid Rest
65 °C - 60 min
75 °C - 10 min - Mash Out

Fermented at 19 degrees.

Had a few issues. Crushed the wheat quite fine to try and get a better efficiency - I used about 300g of oat husks to prevent too many issues, but still felt a need to stir the mash about ten minutes in - after that I had to throttle the recirculation to stop it going on the overflow

Nonetheless, my refractometer gave me 1.052 (spot on!) though my tilt said 1.045 - never sure what to believe!

I then had some power issues into the brew and the temperature dropped to 17.3 at one point. A few days on, the airlock has stopped bubbling as much and the tilt is reading 1.020. I will take a proper reading to see where it has landed. Hopefully the temp drop for about 8 hours didn't affect it too much

 

[Fritzpoll85]

I think this has come out pretty well - just the right balance of flavours, and a good colour- 23 litres of this will go down swiftly. Weizenbock next.....

 

[pilgrimhudd]

I think this has come out pretty well - just the right balance of flavours, and a good colour- 23 litres of this will go down swiftly. Weizenbock next.....

View attachment 34753

Looks great!

 

[buddsy]

That does look good!


buddsy

 

[Fritzpoll85]

But late writing this one up - after the failure of the Weizenbock documented in a different thread, I decided to have another go. I reduced the crush and the grain bill as well by scaling down the batch size.

I'm aiming for something caramelly and banana-ish - sort of banoffee like.

Recipe was:

2.6kg Weyermann Pale Wheat
1.6kg Maris Otter
900g Weyermann Munich I
500g Weyermann CaraWheat
300g Crystal Malt
300g Special B
250g Melanoidin
390g Oat Hills

40g Hallertauer Mittelfrueh at 60mins
30g Hallertauer Mittelfrueh at 15mins

20L batch size
2 packets of MJ M20 rehydrated and fermented at 22deg C

This went much more smoothly, though I collected a little too much water post sparge so added an extra 15mins to the boil to reduce it further. Small spill during the transfer, so just under 20L into the FV.

Bubbled like a maniac for 3 days. Went from SG of 1.070 to around 1.020

So about a week in now, and trying to make a decision. Normally I would keg and force carbonate in my fridge fir a while, but given that this is a dark beer, I was thinking I would let it sit nearer 22 degrees or room temperature to condition first.

I also found that some of my bottle conditioned weissbiers had noticeably more banana in them. So I was musing about transferring from FV to a sugar-primed keg, letting it condition for a week or two and then popping it on the gas in the fridge. Is this a daft idea?

 

[Fritzpoll85]

So I opted to just leave it in the FV for a while longer, then crashed it and it is now force carbonating in a keg. Here it is fresh from the fermenter:



Colour is what I was aiming at. Taste us as you'd expect at this stage - a bit malty but definitely young and the flavours haven't quite come together yet. I thinkni will leave this in the fridge for a couple of weeks to condition and see how it is then.

Next up, a festbier!