agro
Well-Known Member
- Joined
- 9/12/05
- Messages
- 152
- Reaction score
- 1
Just put my first AG to bed
The day started well, woke up to find the HLT at temp and ready to go. Mashed in before breakfast and covered the mash tun with a blanket as there was a cool breeze.
* Hit the mash temp right on. I was a little surprised, guess I got lucky.
* The mash only lost 1 degree C over the 75 minutes - looks like the blanket did the job.
* Batch sparge to desired volume. (or at least... what I thought was desired volume).
Crozdog was coming around to trial his new HP burner, so waited for the boil. Unfortunately there were some problems with crozdogs burner so I resorted to the three ring burner, which after some adjustments performed better then I expected.
60 Minute boil. One water top up so I obviously need to account for a higher evaporation rate.
Tested my immersion coil before using it. Glad I did as it was leaking something horrid - fixed and working now
Final volume was 2 litres less than I expected, with the SG marginally higher than I was aiming at. Still within style and the bittering should be OK. I need to re-scale my boiler dip-stick (steel ruler), obviously some errors in the scale.
The brew is now resting in the fridge cool. Way too much hop waste in the fermenter so I need to work on that problem - other than that I think this was a very successful first AG.
From what I can work out - 65% efficiency. Not a bad starting point
Total time - 6 hours.
Some pics as requested:
The HLT
Strike Temp
Yum.. Barley Porridge
Additional Insulation
Lautering - loitering as well
Batch Sparge
The Brewers Assistant
Chilling Out
Far less eventful than I had anticipated. Some connection issues with hoses as I couldn't find the fittings I had bought, nothing major. The biggest issue with the brew is the amount of trub in the fermenter. I'll need to look into ways to resolve this - I usually pour into the fermenter through a Sieve (?spelling?)
I really enjoyed it. It was good to meet Crozdog and his asistants as well
Cheers
Agro.
The day started well, woke up to find the HLT at temp and ready to go. Mashed in before breakfast and covered the mash tun with a blanket as there was a cool breeze.
* Hit the mash temp right on. I was a little surprised, guess I got lucky.
* The mash only lost 1 degree C over the 75 minutes - looks like the blanket did the job.
* Batch sparge to desired volume. (or at least... what I thought was desired volume).
Crozdog was coming around to trial his new HP burner, so waited for the boil. Unfortunately there were some problems with crozdogs burner so I resorted to the three ring burner, which after some adjustments performed better then I expected.
60 Minute boil. One water top up so I obviously need to account for a higher evaporation rate.
Tested my immersion coil before using it. Glad I did as it was leaking something horrid - fixed and working now
Final volume was 2 litres less than I expected, with the SG marginally higher than I was aiming at. Still within style and the bittering should be OK. I need to re-scale my boiler dip-stick (steel ruler), obviously some errors in the scale.
The brew is now resting in the fridge cool. Way too much hop waste in the fermenter so I need to work on that problem - other than that I think this was a very successful first AG.
From what I can work out - 65% efficiency. Not a bad starting point
Total time - 6 hours.
Some pics as requested:
The HLT
Strike Temp
Yum.. Barley Porridge
Additional Insulation
Lautering - loitering as well
Batch Sparge
The Brewers Assistant
Chilling Out
Far less eventful than I had anticipated. Some connection issues with hoses as I couldn't find the fittings I had bought, nothing major. The biggest issue with the brew is the amount of trub in the fermenter. I'll need to look into ways to resolve this - I usually pour into the fermenter through a Sieve (?spelling?)
I really enjoyed it. It was good to meet Crozdog and his asistants as well
Cheers
Agro.