Brewday Fun and Mayhem

Savannah Brown Ale
Today was a fun day at the DIY brewery. Man it takes a full day when brewing all-grain, but it's good fun. All my real work was done in the early hours, so I got a jump on brewing by milling 4kg of malt. (actually the wife did the hard part) I boiled up 10 litres of rinse water to use later in the day. I formulated a recipe for a brown ale based on brewer's malt, brown toasted and black malts and some dry malt extract.

By 10:30AM I was off and mashing. I mashed a single step infusion mash with a grist ratio of 3.4 litres of water for each per kilogram of malt. I think this works out to the standard 1.5 quarts per pound that my American friends use. Close anyways. I did a 20 minute protein rest at 50ºC as I know this malt has a little much protein. I started mashing at 11AM and held in at 66ºC for 80 minutes. Sweet!

While mashing, I made a make-shift lauter tun from my old friends the blue water jugs. I used a piece of food-grade 10mm tubing in a coil with slices in it as the manifold. I attached it right to the existing water tap on the jug. It fits perfectly. OK, you have to improvise here eh? See photo of the inside of the jug/lauter tun.

I really don't know if the plastic will make the final beer taste like plastic, but I couldn't detect any problems in the samplings of wort that I took before and during the boil. I do know that it works just like the real thing and after recirculating for a minute the bed was set.

For the sparge I used 10 litres at 75ºC and did a batch sparge. I can't be bothered with trickle and wait. I got almost 25 litres out in total and of course I had to use the two biggest pots I had on to hold it all. I like using two pots as I can make a side brew like I did today. In the smaller pot I added some different ingredients and changed the hop schedule.

The boil was 70 minutes all up with 60 of Nugget 12.8% AA, and 15 minutes of Cascade 7.5% AA. In the side batch I added 1/2 cup of brown sugar and in the main batch I added 500g of dark dry malt extract. This should give a more complex "brown" malty taste (I am hoping).

The big chill came with lots of bottles of ice. In fact I didn't have enough ice made to power the chiller tonight, so it's the royal treatment with air conditioning for these guys until they get into their own chiller tomorrow. By the way, on a hot day, the water here is 32ºC and really is not that great for chilling. At least 10 litres of ice is required to chill 20 litres of boiling wort to pitching temperature.

A package of Danstar Nottingham Ale yeast was rehydrated and tossed into a litre of wort pulled from the mash. I boiled and cooled the mini-wort and shook it like mad. Oh well, no harm done and Savannah Brown Ale is on her way. After 4 hours the yeast has gone into a frenzy, swirling and churning and bubbling like a city alive with people. Magic eh?

I'll keep you posted and take some photos of the action.I learned that the Heat index was 44C today. Man I could go for a beer right now.
Cheers!

Down By The Old Malt Mill

Gee, I wish I had a barley mill. I want to experiment with the malt I've made and want to check out how it looks, feels and behaves compared to commercially available malts I've used before.

Diastatic Power
One thing of most interest is the diastatic power of the malt. A well modified base malt will have at least 20% more muscle so that things that cannot self convert their own starch can be included in the mash. The base malt has the extra amylase to convert other things such as corn, rice, unmalted barley and oatmeal. The amylase enzymes float around in the mash at 60 to 70ºC chomping all that starch into sugars.

Extract brewers need not worry as all the sugars are already available. So with extract recipe no enzymes are needed. Enzymes are denatured (killed) in the evaporation and or drying processes.

Anyways, back to the mill. The idea of a barley mill is to crush the grain and not shred its husk. We are going to need the husk intact to act as a filter in the lauter tun (aka cooler). We also don't want the seed to be pulverized into powder as the flour can cause gummy blobs that block the flow from the lauter tun and cause 'stuck mashes'. So the job the mill has to do is like a rolling pin with enough force to crumble the insides of the seed and yet leave the husk in pretty good shape.

Git Yer Rollin' Pin
Seeing as though I have no real barley mill, but I do have a rolling pin I thought I'd give that a go. By placing a few cups of malt in a heavy duty plastic bag I began rolling and crushing. I did this in the kitchen on the big cutting board.

The result was pretty good and looked consistent with what I was hoping for in a crush. Now a few cups is a few cups, but I have lots of cups to crush.

It's a lot of work, it's hot and I am getting thirsty. I guess I am going to have to make some beer soon.

Cheers!