Matt's Brewdays

[two_tails]

Evening all,

I thought it would be good to keep a running thread going of what I've been brewing, hopefully I can ask silly questions when I get things wrong.

This weekend I had the chance to fit a quick few hours of brewing in; wanting to stick with something simple that I had brewed before, I dug out the recipe for Brewdog’s Dead Pony Club.

I was hoping everything would go well so that I can give a few bottles away as Christmas presents. I really need to improve some of my equipment so as to make the mash a bit easier – I batch sparged this time around but would love to be able to fly sparge. My post-mash gravity was way off target (according to Beersmith) but then OG after the boil was spot on so maybe I’m just reading something wrong.

At some point during sparging I realised I was using the wrong recipe and was going to end up with 8 litres that wouldn’t fit in my small fermenter.

Not to be fazed, I got the large fermenter out and swapped the taps and thermowells over (not sure why I only appear to have one tap at the moment!).

Disaster averted and the boil went well. I was really maxing out the capacity of the pot I was using though and got closer than ever to a boil-over. I usually use an autosyphon to move wort from the kettle to the fermenter once cooled but unfortunately this time it got clogged straight away with some hop leaves and when trying to clear it I dislodged the small plastic clip in the bottom of the syphon. This clip seems to reduce the backflow of the liquid which then meant I couldn’t get any wort out – I reverted to the more traditional method – sucking on the end of the pipe!

I’ve no idea how I’m going to get that clip back in….(any advice?!)

I was happy just to get the yeast in at this point, fairly confident that we’d have some nice beer to drink. Unfortunately when I turned on the Inkbird, I forgot to actually put the temperature probe into the thermowell. I thought it odd when we got home and the beer was still only at 16C … it was actually at 30C, so this beer could taste interesting.

I might try and get away from work in good time on Friday and see if I can’t have a more successful brew day, making a stout for the first time.

Thanks for reading, cheers!

 

[MyQul]

What yeast did you use?

 

[two_tails]

A packet of Mangrove Jacks M36.

I tasted it last night, and I seem to have gotten away with it, I'll dry hop soon and bottle in a week or so and see how it goes!

 

[two_tails]

I found some time last night to bottle the Dead Pony Club clone and was hoping for some capping success using my new bench bottle capper – as recommended (or similar) by John (Thanks John!) in a previous post.

Unfortunately I seem to have drilled lots of holes in various fermentation buckets (there was a reason!) but don’t have enough thermowells to fill them, so using my small fermenter as a bottling bucket was out of the question unless I wanted to use it as a sieve!

I’d fermented this smallish batch (8L) in the big plastic fermenter (25L) and so used the tap and some tube to syphon the beer back into one of my kettles a couple of days ago. I’m glad I didn’t try and bottle directly from here as there was a lot of trub and floating hops which would have got in the way (I need to adjust the dry hop schedule for this recipe as it comes out rather more hoppy then desired, especially when you leave the hops in there for 5 days rather than 3 again….).

This meant I could re-sterilise the big bucket, and syphon back into there before using the bottling stick to fill the bottles – in the end I managed to get 15 bottles filled, not great but less lost than in previous attempts.

Hand capper (left) vs bench capper (right)
I think, unfortunately, my bench capper has come fitted with the 29mm attachment rather than the 26mm, it did a great job of half fitting the caps! I put a cap on every bottle using this (which at least made sure they were on straight) and then followed up afterwards with the hand capper. The hand capper worked much better on caps that were already held relatively securely in place.

Slightly large capper (I think!)
I had a quick measure of the capping attachment and it definitely seems too big (unless I’m missing something really obvious!) so I shall email the supplier and try and get that sorted asap. Other than that, the capper seems like it is good quality and should make one of the more painful parts of the brewing process a little less stressful – now if only I didn’t have to wash and sterilise all those bottles….

I discovered a new top tip on one of the homebrew forums whilst trying to get the horrible sticky label residue off of all the bottles we had sat around. A paste made of olive oil and bicarbonate of soda smeared onto the bottle and left for a minute before wiping off removes all the glue, amazing! I can’t believe how well this worked