Luckyeddie's AG#21 - Disaster Area

[luckyeddie]

Just had my first unmitigated AG disaster.

It should have been a Belgian Pale - I was looking to get around 20 litres @ 1052 or so...

MO 1.5 kg
Belgian Pils 1.5 kg
Light Candi 1.0 kg
Biscuit Malt 0.300 kg
Cara Gold 0.200
Chocolate Malt 0.050 kg

Fuggles 30g @ 60 mins
EKG 20g @ 15 mins

Yeasties Chimay Bottle Culture

Well, all went well with the mash and the sparge water was nice and stable at 77C half an hour in. I got to sparge time and I checked the water again - 70C. The boiler light was on but nobody was home (a bit like my head). Either the thermostat had gone or the element had blown up. One of those Brupak boilers - less than a year old and just the 21st time I'd used it.

It was a total loss.

So I ran the wort out of the mash tun and sparged for a couple of minutes anyway, but only bothered collecting 12 litres - I just wanted to make the mash tun easier to clean out.

Anyway, I thought that I'd boil it anyway, planning to fridge the wort and use it for starters, so I dug out the four biggest saucepans and monopolised the cooker for a couple of hours, but I thought 'what the hell', threw in the candi, weighed out the hops, popped them in a couple of hop socks and whacked them in at 60min and 15 mins

I sloshed the wort into a bucket, topped back up to 12 litres with boiled water, crash chilled, banged the Chimay starter in, aerated and racked to a FV.

It's 1090 og so given the usual attenuation I get from my Chimay culture, we're going to be around 10 - 11%.

I'm hoping it's a dud, because I'll never be able to reproduce this. Bloody boiler.

 

[Wendy1971]

Bad luck we had a brupaks boiler and promptly got rid as it was **** :cry:

 

[luckyeddie]

Yep.

It's just the push I need to go all-shiny. I'm going to get a 50 litre pot and a propane burner, but I wasn't planning to do that until after Christmas. I'll perhaps rip a kettle to bits and pop the element in the plaggy boiler - that'll do for now, and it'll do as a temporary HLT.

 

[Vossy1]

Why was it a total loss L, I'm not with it :grin: :hmm:
Couldn't you have just heated a little extra water to bring the sparge water temp up?

 

[luckyeddie]

In the end it wasn't a total loss, Vossy - I got a 12 litre batch at 1090 og - but doing a full sparge to get my planned 20 litres was a no-no. There was no way I could boil that much - I had just enough saucepan capacity to do the 12 litres I had collected. Post-boil (huge surface area in comparison to the volume) I had 7 litres, so I liquored-back with boiled water to 12 again.

I had to use hop sacks, so no way to get rid of the cold break material (no filtration bed) - it was a case of dump everything in a FV and crash-chill there, pitch the yeast, aerate and cross my fingers.

If I have time tomorrow morning I'll double-drop to clean out most of the break - then I'm off on my holidays for a week.

 

[snail59]

Eddie im sure it will be an amazing beer. Remember my Comedy of Errors came 3rd in the Spring thing ESB class and that was a disaster brew day :grin:

 

[gurtpint]

Boiler troubles, what a load of... Don't you just hate it when it happens. Great that you were able to make the most of the situation anyway!

 

[luckyeddie]

Just back from holiday - I didn't have time to double-drop because Ryanair won't hold up a flight, even for something as important as beer. It's still fermenting away quite steadily - I think the fact that the house was unoccupied allowed the FV to cool and slowed the fermentation down somewhat.

Taking the boiler back to the shop on Friday - the guys at Creative Winemaking, Spondon (free plug) will sort me out no problem. Next step is to get a 50 litre pot and just use the boiler as a sparge HLT. I'm not sure yet whether to go electric or propane for the boiler - I'll make that decision based upon the type of pot I can find available.

 

[luckyeddie]

From a start point of 1090, it's now 1004 - Chimay yeasties are just animals - and still fermenting, although now very slowly - a bubble every 10 minutes or so. I'll give it another 2 days then consider bottling. I've had a taste - not what I originally envisaged, of course, but definitely beer and definitely in the style Belgique. 11.5% is a bit much for a sipping bitter (which is what we were originally looking for a 'Belgian Pale').

Taste-wise, I would put it in the Rochefort 8 area. Not over-sweet and cloying, although the strength is very much in Rochefort 10 / Westvleteren 12 ballpark.

I fancy giving it a bit of a hoppy kick - after all, it's not a beer that I'm ever going to make again so it's been an experiment right from the minute that my HLT/boiler went belly-up. It's too late to dry-hop, so I reckon I'm going to rack it off the primary yeast this afternoon, boil 25g of Citra (in a hop sack) in a litre of water and slosh that in. Diluting it a bit might encourage the yeasties to have another go.

:hmm:

Hands up all those who reckon I ought to give it another kilo of Candi and see if we can hit 14% alcohol? You know, just to really see what these Chimay yeasties are made of?