Tag Archives: HFR

May 202105Wed

I heard about a technique referred to as Hot French Randall a while back and wanted to give it a go, so what better candidate than the American Pale I was brewing with my first batch of harvested yeast?

Splitting Thirst Scratch

My dedicated stainless steel cafetière had arrived a couple of weeks previously and Thirst Scratch was coming up for dry hopping, so I decided to split the hops into two equal portions and do the same with the brew, once I’d removed it from the refrigerator where it’s been cold-crashing for a few days. It actually went pretty well with only two hiccups.

  • The final dose of hops consisted of 25g Citra and 25g Falconer’s Flight, which I’d mixed together and sealed in a vacuum bag when I was weighing out the ingredients right at the start. Today I released the vacuum and gave the bag a good shake, but can’t be 100% sure that the two 25g batches I divided it into each contain exactly the same ratio of both hop types.
  • There’s a small chance of contamination from the new cafetière because the design features an inaccessible void in the lid which can nevertheless gather water, and it did so during cleaning. I noticed some black sludgy substance on the shaft as I was about to seal in the hops, and decided to wipe it off with some fresh kitchen roll, knowing it won’t be 100% sanitary but having to bow to the lesser of two evils or junk the experiment.

As tests go it won’t be totally clinical anyway because I didn’t add a cafetière of water to the half of the beer which remained in the bucket it was cold-crashed in (so the other half will be slightly more diluted) and I didn’t rack the ‘standard’ dry-hopped treatment to a fresh bucket, which means it’s still sitting in whatever it dropped during crashing.

Both vessels are now in the brewery at ambient temperatures of around 17.5℃ and as they’d finished fermenting I don’t expect their contents to be much above that. The traditionally dry-hopped bucket is a 25 litre plastic FV, the HFR treatment sits in my 10 litre SS Brewtech bucket, which was filled via the bottom spigot using a racking cane after being roughly purged of oxygen via a blast of CO2 from the top.

Continue reading