A good brew day without incident, the only unexpected factor being that I was supposed to be doing a SMaSH with a friend today but that was cancelled, so Geronimo it was. Not having time to make a starter and with a whole bag of OYL-061 Voss in the fridge I decided to try under-pitching and a warm ferment in order to get some of the supposedly fantastic citrus flavours creeping out.
We’ll see how that goes, but for now I’m pleased to report that despite a slow start I’m seeing strong fermentation since the small hours of this morning (approx 14 hours after pitching) and I see that the spunding valve was set way too high at 15 PSI. I’m dialling that back to 7 PSI because I want the esters to have a chance, at least until I dry-hop at which point I’ll increase back to 15 PSI to give me a safety net for cold-crashing.
Brew Day Notes
0635 Start dough-in. Nearly forgot the DWB and Lactic Acid!
0645 Dough-in finished, start mash rest
0705 Start Mashing. Must remember to order some rice hulls for next time – this one looks pretty thick already.
0825 Halfway done with mash-out at 75℃. Looks like 25 litres bang-on with the malt pipe in place.
0835 Lifting malt pipe ahead of sparge
0840 Start sparge
0846 Sparge done. That felt longer than it lasted, but the rate was pretty good. Still dripping, but pre-boil volume is around 28.0 litres against an expected 28.86. Hmmm. Do we need to tweak the grain absorption rate (GAR) again? Pre-boil gravity 1.038 (1.022 @ 61℃) against predicted 1.044. Holy crap! Low in volume and 6 points down!!
0940 Boil underway, 45 minutes to run. I’m going to pitch half a pack of liquid Voss Kveik (Omega OYL-061) and in preparation I’ve decanted 75g into a sanitised, chilled cup which is now warming to room temperature.
1005 Dropping in the Trubinator and chiller coil shortly, so let’s check on levels: 26 litres. Expected post-boil volume is 26.46 so we’re not too far off. Volume after cutting in is 25 litres.
1100 Start chilling. Post-boil gravity 1.059 (1.032 @ 78.2℃) against expected 1.048, looks like 24 litres in there with chiller and Trubinator, so realistically 25 litres versus expected 26.46.
1120 Return temperature now 21℃, preparing for transfer.
1150 Transfer finished. Trubinator stole quite a lot of wort, so even with a 2 litre fermenter top-up I’m only seeing 20 litres in the Fermzilla. Never mind, OG now 1.052 and aiming for 5.6% ABV. Pitching the yeast wasn’t as difficult as I thought; although it had separated out and sunk to the bottom of the cup, it soon came loose with a quick swirl and jumped right in. Red tilt deployed.
1245 Clean-up finished. Feels crazy, but I’m going to ramp to 34℃ fermentation temperature because I’m intrigued by reports of what Voss can tolerate, including data in this article. Spunding valve set for 7 PSI.