@ caiosa
I read on another thread that you have a short malt pipe for your 50L unit.
Here is a
simple and delicious beer to make.
DrSmurto's Landlord (link to original recipe on this forum
http://www.aussiehomebrewer.com/forum/index.php?autocom=recipedb&code=show&recipe=680)
also see the discussion about it for different versions:
http://www.aussiehomebrewer.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=29871
See post #48 here
http://www.aussiehomebrewer.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=57118&st=40 for a discussion of the short malt pipe in the 50L BM.
Grain bill for short malt pipe in 50L Braumeister (BM):
3.91 kg - 97% Marris Otter (Thomas Fawcett - England).
0.14 (140g) 3% of a nice medium to dark crystal malt (preferably English)
Original Gravity target is 1.043. Final Gravity 1.012. Bitterness approx 30 IBU. ABV 4.0%. Efficiency: 80%. Taste: delicious!
Hops
38.3 g Fuggles (4.5% AA) boiled for 60 minutes
21.2g Goldings, East Kent (5.0% AA) boiled for 20 minutes
30g Styrian Goldings (5.4% AA) thrown in when the boil is finished
If the hops you have or buy are a different Alpha Acid % (x% AA) you will need to put more or less by weight into the brew to keep the same IBU's. This needs to be calculated. These particular varieties are low AA% and don't change too much but the beer could end up too bitter than it should be if you got Fuggles at 10% AA (though not likely).
Put 30L of water in to the Braumeister and turn it on. Do not put the malt pipe in until it tells you to.
Try mashing in at 50oC for a 10 minute rest and then mash at 66oC for 60 minutes, last step at 78oC for 10 minutes. Set the boil for 90 minutes.
Mash with the lid on, boil with the lid off.
When mash is finished:
Lift the malt pipe up and set on the support rail to drain into the BM. Leave the filter plate and filter on top of the grain.
Part boil an electric kettle (stop it before it has boiled) and tip 4 litres of water on top of the malt pipe, filter plate to drain back into the BM. Pour it around so all parts of the grain will get rinsed on the way through.
Start the boil sequence whilst the malt pipe is draining into the BM. You will have a period of time (15-20 minutes perhaps) until it gets up to boiling temperature for the boil phase to start.
Put the lid upside down on a bucket with one of the vents going into the bucket. Sit the malt pipe on top of the lid so that it covers the vent into the bucket. You can tip another 2 litres of hot water over the malt pipe for it to drain into the bucket. Collect the liquid from the bucket to be used for emergency purposes (for instance when it boiled you didn't end up with as much liquid as you thought because it evaporated too much. Maybe you had more trub in the bottom than you were expecting?)
Throw hops into boil at appropriate times.
With only 10 minutes of boil remaining throw half a tablet of Whirlfloc into the boil.
Now it depends on whether you have a plate chiller, an immersion chiller, a no-chill cube or whether you stick the lid on and come back tomorrow.
So you start with 30L in the BM. You pull the grain out. That removes about 4-5L of water. You sparge (or rinse) the grain with 4-5L of hot water to replace the volume that the grain removed by soaking it up. You have 30L before the boil begins. At the end of the 90 minute boil you have about 25-26L of wort. You will lose some of that to the trub and hops in the bottom of the BM - leave that gunk on the bottom in the BM. You will get about 23-24LL into your fermenter. After it has fermented you may lose a couple of litres to the yeast trub in the bottom of the fermenter. Bottled or kegged maybe 19-22L?
A brilliant yeast for this recipe is a liquid yeast: West Yorkshire Ale (Wyeast 1469).
If you want to know about what other grains you could use instead of those or what other yeast you could use, it has been asked before, see the discussion thread I linked to.
Sparging or rinsing sugars from the grains can be very important. If you need to add water to the kettle to bring it up to volume it is best to add it as sparge water. Even if you have that sparge water sitting in a bucket you can choose whether it is needed or not. If you add plain water to the kettle, it won't have contain any sugar. If you add sparge water, depending on the recipe, it may well have sugars, flavours and colours to add to the brew. When you boil the wort, water comes off through evaporation, sugar stays in; the sugar concentration gets stronger as the wort volume decreases. Therefore plain water added to the kettle adds nothing except water to evaporate, sparge water might just give some extra sugar that might mean the difference between ending up near your expected gravity or under it. If you have to add water, it may as well be sparged water. But don't throw 100L at the malt pipe in the bucket, any sugars that might be there would be too diluted and adding 1-2L (of the 100L) to the kettle near the end of the boil may not add anything usefull.
As I said in another thread, brewing software can help you plan all of these sorts of things.
