Standard brew day with just one mishap: forgot to gauge the kettle levels before cutting in the chiller. The numbers were pretty much spot-on today except for the final FV volume, because I didn’t use the Trubinator and rather than sucking up the last 2 litres of gunky wort I decided to cut my losses and ended up with 20 litres in the fermenter, which is about right for a 19 litre Cornelius keg anyway.
One thing I changed from the first go at this recipe is the quantity of rice hulls, which was reduced from 75g to 50g with no ill effects. I think next time that can be cut back further or maybe eliminated altogether, because there was no problems with the mash not flowing despite the new regime of not stirring.
Oh yeah, the yeast. My final pack of WLP-002 may have been past its best because the 24 hour old starter looked completely inert when I pitched it, and unlike the last attempt it didn’t take off for about 36 hours. Worried? Me? Hmmm.
Anyway, I’m writing this 2 days after brew day and it’s running fine now. For next time I’m going to tidy up the batch recipe to reconcile fermentation into one step (never do secondary anyway) and maybe get some clarity on the dry-hopping at 7 days. Not sure how the recipe aligns with what I did last time, nor what I’ll do this time. Gotta leave some room for improvement, right?
Brew Day Notes
0650 Start dough-in
0700 Start Mash rest
0730 Start Mashing. Bit of a faff fitting the recirculation manifold which, like usual, refused to budge initially and then slid down the pipe too far with a splash. Feckin’ thing.
0740 Forgot to add the misc ingredients; DWB, calcium chloride, gypsum. Restarting mash tracker.
0855 Heating to 77℃ for mash-out with heaters on manual. Wonderfully clear wort! 1.036 @ 63.5℃ = 1.054. Kettle volume 24 litres with malt pipe in. Looks good, but let’s see how that’s impacted by sparging.
0905 Start sparging
0909 Sparge complete. Looks like 28.25 litres with malt pipe out, boil volume 28.86 was expected. Pre-boil gravity 1.020 @ 67.5℃ = 1.040 – bang on the expected value, just a bit low on volume.
0930 Boil tracker started, 60 minute additions in.
10:40 Boil over, forgot to measure levels before cutting in chiller – oops! Anyway, 1.019 @ 84℃ = 1.049 against 1.044, and 24 litres with chiller in.
1045 Chiller started.
1130 Transfer finished. I’m stopping it slightly earlier than previous, seems like there’s a fair bit of trub in the bottom and I’d rather have clarity than another 3 or 4 pints. 20 litres indicated in fermenter.
1315 Clean-up finished, red Tilt Pro deployed. Blue was used initially but there was no response, maybe battery related. Starter still looks dead too, will have to keep an eye on things over the next 24 hours.