Friday Is Brew Day

Completed another brew though not without some problems. Some caused by me and avoidable. the main one being that the Thrifty Shopper failed to deliver the dry malt which they promised for yesterday. This one not being my fault. Luckily I changed the brew I was going to make to another one that required less dry malt. What can I say. Age is one contributing factor another is the fact that I can sometimes be stupid. I boiled 23 litres of water yesterday and left overnight to cool. This morning I dissolved 2120 grams of dry malt in 10 litres of water at 40C. Poured this into the boiler and topped up with another 13 litres of warm water. I then put 290 grams of Crystal Malt in a filter bag and put that in the boiler. I took this bag out when the wort came to the boil. I took my eye of the boiler for a minute and had the classic over boil as the dry malt tends to foam up quite a bit when it is boiled. This was avoidable by the simple method of leaving the lid off the boiler. However, I only partially covered the boiler with the lid but it was enough. Luckily I caught it before it could do too much damage but it did make a bit of a mess. I correctly added 310 grams of white sugar at the 45 minute mark. The other stupid thing I did was to add the second batch of hops and the Irish moss at the same time as the sugar instead of the last ten minutes of the boil. I don't know how this will effect the end product but time will tell. At the end of the 90 minute boil I switched the boiler off and allowed the hops and the rest of the dross to settle to the bottom. Then I sterilised the fermenting vessel and ran some of the cooled water into that followed by the wort from the boiler. It was then a simple matter to top to the 23 litre mark with the remaining cooled water. Screwed the lid on and will leave until the temperature of wort drops to about 26C before placing in the heated cupboard and pitching the yeast.

To bring my stocks back to a normal level I will have to have another brew day next Friday. I will decide which beer to brew over the weekend and order the necessary supplies from the Thrifty Shopper. Although I will have to have a plan B just in case they let me down again. If their website shows any of the ingredients that I want are out of stock I will order from another source. Though I hope they can get their act together as I have had great service and good value for money from them in the past.