I wanted to revisit one of my first ever brews and have something I can share this summer, so it made sense to break out a popular one: Woodforde’s Wherry. There’s not much to say about “brew day” other than wow, aren’t kit beers quick and easy? Following my forays into all-grain brewing it makes a refreshing change to accomplish with one can opener in less than 5 minutes what I’d otherwise spend 5 or 6 hours doing, not to mention the clean-up operation afterwards.

A couple of tweaks from my last kit brew:

• I used a mixture of iced water and regular tap water to make sure I arrived at my target temperature and fermentation volume at the same time. No Tesco Ashbeck this time around, couldn’t tell the difference which either means we have good water or my taste buds are shot. Nil desperandum.
• Instead of stirring the wort in order to introduce oxygen I used my aeration kit, dangling the stone in my chilled wort while pumping in pure O2 for a couple of minutes until there was a 2″ head on the bucket.
• Deployed a newly arrived Tilt Pro (blue) and set up cloud logging so that I can keep an eye on fermentation progress without having to open the fermenter.
• Placed the bucket into my newly commissioned fermentation fridge and dialled the Inkbird to 19 ℃. There’s a discrepancy between the readings from the Tilt (1.032 / 19.2 ℃) and the actuals (1.045 / 18.9 ℃) but I’m more interested in the progress graph than absolute values.