Fairly standard brew day today but with disappointing results, probably due to the thickness of the mash. To be honest I’m still not sure whether to manually correct my hydrometer readings before plugging them into Brewfather, or if it’s smart enough to know that a pre-boil reading following mash-out at 75℃ needs to be corrected for 75℃, and doesn’t expect the user to leave the batch screen, head over to the tools screen, do the correction, then plug the values back into the batch screen. On a previous batch (Hornindal Pale) I worked out that the efficiency is the same and just the actuals vary, but on this one I’m unsure. Anyway, these things are probably best pondered over with a fresh head, and not after a long brew day. A couple of images and raw notes to follow.
Brew Day Notes
0935 Start dough-in
0950 Finished dough-in. It’s a biggie!
1015 First stir, settled slightly but still very dense. Might end up mashing this for longer than the usual 60 minutes. Starting mash.
1130 Just under 15 minutes left to run of my ad-hoc 90 minutes mash. It’s been touch and go a few times and even with regular stirring at 10 – 15 minutes I nearly had an overflow once.
1145 My 90 minute mash is done, heating to 75℃ for mash-out.
1155 Reached 75℃, now for a 10 minute mash-out.
The prescribed sparge amount is just 780 ml and I’m not convinced that there’s any value in dragging out the HLT and sparge attachment for such a small run, so instead I’m using a thermos flask with hot water, pouring directly onto the raised malt pipe.
1205 Mash-out complete, raising malt pipe. ‘Sparging’ with 700 ml of thermos water.
Pre-boil volume looks very low, barely 22 litres, should be 25.73. Putting in another 2 x 700 ml via the thermos, doubt it’ll make much difference. Measured pre-boil gravity is 1.048 @ 66.5 ℃, works out at 1.068. Expected is 1.074. Boil volume after dripping for a few minutes is 24 litres. Heaters to maximum at 1215.
1245 Boil tracker on, 60 minute additions in. This time I’m including a small nub of Lipohop, just in case. We’re under 25 litres of boil volume and can probably handle quite a bit more without worrying about boil-over as the hops go in, but I’m being cautious today.
1345 Engines off, start chilling. Looks like about 20 litres in there, but as usual I forgot to take the reading before adding the chiller coil, so it’s probably more like 22. Post-boil gravity is 1.056 at 66.5℃, so 1.076. Was aiming for 1.082.
1415 Tank temperature is 30℃, return temperature 20.7℃. Starting transfer to 25 litre stainless FV.
1425 Transfer finished. It looked very low so I added 2 litres of San Pelegrino, the only sealed water I had to hand. Gravity thereafter was 1.062, volume without starter 20 litres. With an expected 1.082 I’m luck to get 7% from this!
Pretty poor figures today! With the optimistic version of my readings plugged into Brewfather (manually temperature corrected SG readings versus raw – still not sure what’s the intended way) I’m looking at 56% brewhouse efficiency.
1550 Clean-up finished