First brew day since Nov last year! Who knew working for the NHS and having a 1 year old child would sap all your time?
Had a tidy up of my brew space and found mouse/rat droppings on some of my gear.
Everything got a good bleach and soak, luckily my grain is in plastic boxes so I guess they were just hoovering up any stray grains. I'll keep my eye out and maybe let the cat in there a bit more often.
Also my gas has ran out over the winter, it was close to running out anyway (the needle was already dropping which is a sign it's close). I'll have to get some ordered on Monday. Wonder if the prices have gone up.
Brew day went 'ok', I decided to do 2 beers today as we have my wife's family over to stay from France next month and I wanted a couple in stock.
Beer #1: User Upper Pale Ale. Bit of a mish mash this one, just kind of winging it here. I had a load of left overs from previous brews so thought I'd just use them all up. 3kg Vienna, 1.5kg Maris otter, 1kg wheat.
I tipped about 20g of a random mix of hops (from a previous batch that I'd forgotten to dry hop) at 60 mins and decided not to hop it at whirlpool and I'll just put everything into dry hopping.
I've got about 600g of random hops left over from last year that have been in the garage fridge over winter, so will probably do 2x 250g hop charges then keg hop with the last 100g. It's a mix of hüll melon, citra, Amarillo and an unnamed mixed bag.
SG on this is 1.052. Currently no-chilling in the garage. Yeast will be a Kentucky common I got from crossmyloof last year.
Beer #2 is a smaller batch of Chinook pale.
After transferring the first beer there was about 9L of wort (including dead space) left in the Robobrew, so I topped back up to 15L with RO water, added a 1.5kg tin of 'Geordie lager' kit.
60 min boil, then whirlpooled and added 100g Chinook at 80c.
Collected 13L of wort, also no-chilling and I'll dry hop with 200g Chinook in a few days.
OG was 1.048 on this one and I'll just use the yeast that came with the kit.
Should have a couple of alright beers there I reckon.