In the beginning I couldn’t work out how the combination of 2 litres of water with 500g sugar, 1 litre to flush out the can, plus 5 litres cold water would make a 9 litre brew (and was about to turn to the internet for help) when it occurred to me that the actual can contents would make up the missing litre. First oops.

The second oops happened after I had combined everything and started cooling to 20℃ for yeast pitching: I’d forgotten that I specifically purchased some spraymalt with this kit in order to improve the mouth feel and general quality, but now I’d mixed everything together, including the full 500g sugar. Too late to replace some of the sugar with spraymalt as planned, so I went for the third of three options from the instruction page:

Add one pack of Spraymalt to any standard recipe in addition to the 1 kg of sugar suggested with the beer kit. This will not only boost the malt flavour but also brew a stronger beer without destroying the beer’s natural character. The beer brewed will be approximately 20% stronger than the standard recipe. Hopped Light again is ideal, improving the hop flavour of the final beer as well as the general richness.

Option 3 of 3: Spraymalt in addition to the suggested sugar

I tried to dissolve the spraymalt in a little water before adding it to my rapidly cooling wort, but this just produced a hideously lumpy amalgam similar to a mixture of sourdough and baby puke. Nothing really for it but to throw this in and hope for the best, though I did measure SG before and after, 1.072 and 1.083 respectively.

At the risk of adding one more oops to today’s efforts, I just noticed that the above option 3 of 3 calls for adding the spraymalt to the included 1 kg of sugar, but my kit only called for 500g of sugar, which of course I added. So now I’m left with a very lumpy wort containing all the sugar it needs, in addition to enough spraymalt to raise twice the quantity of wort by 20%. Can’t wait what this does to my Tripel, though I guess the one saving grace is that at just over 9 litres there’s plenty of headroom in the 23 litre bucket. I pitched the included yeast (Misty Wit Ale, 8g) and sealed the lid, leaving the bucket in my office at 20 ℃. Airlock activity started pretty much straight away.

Bit of a shaky start to making my first Belgian style brew, hope she turns out all right.