What are you brewing?

[nzbrewer]

Since this is the most popular thread on the RealBeer.co.nz forum I thought I would start it here just to see what happens

[Dougal]

I've been trying a mixture of methods. BIAB with direct heat seems the quickest, but I think a wire rack in the bottom of the pot is a must. The punched sheet metal rack from my Agee preserver seems to hold heat underneath so you get unpredictable jumps in temperature when it releases the hot liquid. 

Infusion works well in a mash tun too, though you need to start with a low water:grist ratio. 

[Kelly Milligan]

Kegged this last night with the first dry hop, finishing numbers:

OG: 1.076

FG: 1.016

Really happy with the malt profile, tastes clean, that 007 is incredible, 1 week turnaround! Stepped from 16c up to 21c over the week then down to 6c for day 7-10 before kegging. i LOVE this temp controlled fridge, what a revelation. 

Happy happy joy joy

[Tilt]

Sweet result Kelly - sounds good and tasty.  We tried the heat stick for the first time over the weekend to raise to mash out temps. It was all pretty painless really - no scorching and it went from 64 to 76degrees in about 10minutes but we did need to kep stirring the whole time.  Keen to try the step mash with it now.

[Kelly Milligan]

Nice! What were you doing before that? Batch sparging with high temps? You should be able to do pretty awesome step mashing with that now :D 

[Tilt]

Previously I'd do an infusion mash out and then fly sparge at mashout temps.  With a 40L mash tun and limited boiling water access anything more than one temp raise saw me getting close to the tun's capacity, overflowing and causing a mess.  Now I can do as many steps as I want and never overflow the tun.  Looking forward to messing about with protein rests and other steps.

[jt]

I think my hydrometer is duff, or maybe I just overpitched, or maybe I need an eye test. 1034 down to 1004 just doesn't seem right with 1968 and a 69c mash. But I did take two samples to make sure

It tastes ok, otherwise I'd be suspecting something not right in the fermenter

[Tilt]

Weird JT. .But all's well that ends well regardless of the numbers I s'pose. 

[Stu H]

Shieeeet so I'm fermenting an ordinary bitter at the moment with Wyeast 1882 Thames Valley II, and it smell pretty much exactly like Galbraiths at the moment! I wonder....

[Sam]

Hats off to Senator Clay Davis

[Matt Smith]

I made an American Stout the other day, my 54th batch and my first stout, not sure how it slipped through the cracks but I'm mighty looking forward to it now that winter has set in and I have a load of firewood to pickup on Sunday.

1.068
45SRM
65 IBU

80.3% GP
6.4% Medium Crystal
4.5% Oats
4.5% Black
3.2% Chocolate
1.3% Roasted Barley

Bittered with Nugget and a generous dosage of a mix of NZ cascade and Northern Brewer across 15 and 5 min addition. I'm really after that nice woody earthiness from the NB and a little citrus kick from the Cascade. US probably would have been better but I had NZ on hand.

I tried a couple new things with this brew which I'm interested to know if anybody has tried. The first was a mashout by "decoction" rather than infusion. Because my mashtun was so full, If I mashed out by infusion I would have only been left with about 5 Litres to sparge with and I was worried about not rinsing off enough sugars. So I used the decoction calculator on my software, aiming for 77 degrees, I pulled 6.5 Litres, brought it to the boil, then dumped it back in. Unfortunatly it only got up to 72 degrees, which I think was due to the mash sitting for 15 mins while I got the decoction boiling.

The other experiment was adding the roasted grains at end of the mash rather than the start. This is recommended by Gordon Strong as a method to avoid unnecessary astringency from the long hot steep of a mash. He goes as far as suggesting a cold steep and adding the resulting extract near the end of the boil. I put mine in at mashout, so it would have steeped for about 15 mins before beginning the runoff, given the mashout and vorloff time. When I racked this to the fermenter at the end of the day though, the wort didn't seen nearly as dark as I would have expected. To give an idea, I could see right through the hydro sample, it had a dark red tinge in the light, and looked to be more of a very dark brown than black. I know the sample container is small in diameter and wort will look alot darker in a pint glass, but I'm a little worried the late addtion of the roasted grains to the mash wasn't very effective. Does anybody else have experience with this ? And can anybody confirm what the colour of their Stout worts looks like in a hydro sample?

[Scarrfie]

Decoction Mashout, good solution to your problem I reckon.

As for roasted grains my feeling is that you will be more extraction from a mash than a steep, so what I do is put them in around half way through the mash to avoid any astringency. I aim to have them in for 30-45 mins. That is a lot of roasted malt in there and I would have thought it would be pretty black. Taste will be the final judge for you I guess.

[Matt Smith]

Cheers for the tip. Going into the keg, it finished at 1.020 which is a little higher than I wanted it, but it doesn't taste sweet so the roast has definitely come through, but perhaps not to the extent I thought it would. I'll try the same recipe at some stage with the roast half way through and see what difference it makes