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When I was a nipper I was absolutely fascinated by the demonstration of the Bernoulli effect where you hang two ping-pong balls by threads so they rest about 2cm apart; then blow air between them using a drinking straw. The results were so different to what I expected.
Was Savonious' Principal not similar? I have a jurassic memory of writing an essay about it back in the (19!!!)80's
 
Was Savonious' Principal not similar? I have a jurassic memory of writing an essay about it back in the (19!!!)80's
At a stretch maybe? It’s more about drag, a concave surface has far more drag than a convex surface when placed in a moving stream of gas or liquid. I’m not sure how it would apply to my syphon though! 😂
 
Time to keg the last of my current tranche of beers, another batch of Mild. I now have an empty fermentation cabinet so I’m free to crank up the temperature and start the third tranche of beers - more on that shortly. In the meantime, this is the Mild…

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Ooh, that looks cracking 👏
 
Time to keg the last of my current tranche of beers, another batch of Mild. I now have an empty fermentation cabinet so I’m free to crank up the temperature and start the third tranche of beers - more on that shortly. In the meantime, this is the Mild…

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Phwoar!
 
Now my fermentation cabinet is empty I can brew some beers that need higher fermentation temperatures (my fermentation cabinet has space for 4 fermenters but all must be at the same temperature).

I’m going to set the temperature to 26C and brew four beers that will hopefully benefit from being fermented at this temperature. I decided on Saison, a Trappist single, a Belgian Tripel, and a Raspberry Sour.

Tomorrow starts with the Saison.
 
So it’s arrived, my first brew-day for virtually two weeks. Yay!

Today will be a Saison!

The water profile is quite low mineral but sulphate rich. Salts weighed out, 28 litres of liquor and the whole amount treated. 20 litres of treated liquor now heating for the mash, 8 set aside for sparge. Time to mill some grain while the water heats to 148F (64.4C).

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Today I kegged a batch of Summer Breeze and it was a little challenging because the syphon kept filling with gas. I hope this was CO2 being released from the beer because it stopped the syphon from working and I effectively had to pump the beer into the keg. If the gas was air squeezing past the syphon seal I pumped air through my beer dozens of times as I filled the keg and it will be rotten in no time. Very frustrating. I’ve never had taps on my fermenters because I don’t altogether trust them but right now I’m starting to trust my syphon even less!! :mad:

Anyway, this is how it looks today…

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Time to replace with fermzilla all-rounder not much difference in size to your buckets and then you can ditch the Syphon and close transfer 😋.
 
Right, the grain is milled and the water is up to temp. The grain bill is 2800g Pilsner malt, 450g Wheat malt, 150g Rye malt. I’ll be adding 400g of sugar later. By my reckoning the grain should give me a pre-sparge gravity of around 1048 depending on my mash extraction.

Time to dough in. This stage of the mash will take 20 mins and then I’ll raise the temperature to 158F (70C).

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The mash is done and I’m into the sparge. Gravity after 20 mins at 148F was 1034 and pH was 5.22, after another 20 mins at 158F gravity was 1042, and at the end of the mash-out gravity ended up at 1047 so is 1 point lower than my predicted gravity.

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The sparge is done. While sparging I set the temperature of my fermentation cabinet to 26C because I want to give it time to get up to temperature before I put the wort in to ferment.

While sparging I collected the first 9 litres of runnings into a bucket and at the end, the usual hoisting of the grain basket to drain. After recombining the wort I ended up with a gravity of 1042 (maybe 1042.5) against a calculated 1044 but given that I was 1 point short from the mash, this makes sense.

Time to bring the wort up to the boil.

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The beer is now resting before going into the fermenter. I added 70g of Styrian Goldings to a 60 minute boil for 20 IBU’s and another 30g with 10 minutes to go (contributing another 2 IBU’s). At flameout I added 10g of Indian coriander freshly ground. I chilled down the wort to 85F (29.4C) and by the time it’s rested I expect it to be 79F (26C) - the temperature I will pitch the Belle Saison and subsequently ferment the beer.

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Today I’m brewing the second of four beers in this tranche, a Trappist Single at about 4.8%. The recipe and process are simple for this one. Just 3Kg Pilsner malt, 500g white candi, 250g amber candi, 100g Saaz (70g for bittering), and a pack of M41 yeast. Single-step infusion mash.
 
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Just bringing the wort up to the boil now but in the meantime I thought I should see how the Summer Breeze is doing (well the tap is right next to me).

It’s only been kegged for four days so I already know it needs a little longer to condition, this ale usually needs a couple of weeks. The first observation is that it isn’t a nasty dark brown colour from oxidation so that’s a good start! It’s quite hoppy on the aroma but not so hoppy on the flavour yet, the most obvious flavour component at the moment is the quite assertive bitterness. Satisfied it isn’t oxidised I’ll give it a bit longer and have another taste.

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