I’m sure there was method amongst the madness, at least at the beginning: aim for a smaller batch and see if we can push the ABV past 10%. I dialled the recipe back to 11 litres fermenter volume and increased base malt to get the percentage up, tweaking the darker hops to taste.
Brew day itself was OK, no major mishaps but once again I didn’t quite get the yield I was expecting from my mash and unintentionally compensated with boil-off, which nearly exposed the heating elements enough to cause problems. Two key take-aways from this brew day:
- Don’t go too small in batch size. 11 litres fermenter volume is very close to the wind.
- Add more rice hulls to big brews. Today’s mash was very difficult to get going and only improved halfway though as temperature fluctuated between 65 and 66℃ at core. I think more throughput (via rice hulls) will get better yield.
Brew Day Notes
0655 Start dough-in
0712 Start mash-rest
0740 Stirred, start mashing
0745 Very gloopy still, more rice hulls next time around!
0900 Heating to mash-out, SG 1.072 (1.052 @ 66.4℃) against predicted 1.084 so not great mash efficiency at all.
0940 Malt pipe cleaned, approaching boil with 16.5 litres pre-boil volume. Not used to seeing so little in there, but we’re only expecting 16.36 so at least there I’ve hit some numbers. GAR must be fairly accurate.
0950 Boil tracker on, 60 minute additions in
1035 About to cut in chiller, looks like 14 litres in there.
1055 Just paused boil tracker to test gravity ahead of 5 minute additions, and we’ve just 1.090 (1.058 @ 85℃) against predicted 1.098. I’ll boil for 10 minutes extra but will keep an eye on levels in case the elements become exposed and buckle.
1115 End of boil, starting chill. Although I can’t see the heater elements themselves, the bubbles coming from them are very close to the surface. Let’s make ‘small’ batches a few more litres in future. Edit: with heaters off you can see the elements just breaking surface. Hope they’re OK.
1200 Not much impact to Yeti XI by the 10 minutes extra boil time – OG 1.090.
1230 Clean-up finished