Categories
homebrewing

Testing new brewing equipment

The whizzy sparging arm on our new brewing kit in action

It’s been ages since we brewed — March was, I think, the last time.  We ordered a load of shiny new equipment and then it sat around getting dusty as we spent our weekends doing up the house instead.  Then it was summer, and past experience tells us that summer is not a good time to brew.

Anyway, now our garage is nice and chilly again, we decided to test the new eqiupment (a proper boiler, mash tun and spinning sparging arm).

The one piece of advice I’d give to a new brewer is to invest time in working in a dry run. How are you going to transfer hot liquid from one vessel to another?  Do you have the right pipes / taps?  How are you going to keep everything sterile after the boil?  Can you take a hydrometer reading when you need to with the fermenting bucket you have?

We learnt this the hard way when we did our first all-grain mash. The experience involved lots of hosepipe connectors, spilled wort and frantic improvisation. It was so traumatic and messy that we didn’t do it again for a year.  This time we spent a good couple of hours going through the process with large quantities of water to make sure we’d worked it all out, and it was definitely time well spent.

As for the beer itself, it’s been made with store cupboard leftovers, so it probably won’t be great, but it’s definitely got us back in the mood to brew.

We bought our new kit, which worked like a dream, from the brilliant Hop and Grape in Darlington.

Boak


Categories
Franconia Germany homebrewing recipes

Eppingwalder Pils

eppingwalder

We’ve had a bit of success making lager in the past. As long as you don’t set your sights on recreating the clinical purity of the mass-produced products — if you’re happy with a bit of Czech or Franconian fruitiness — then it’s more than possible to come up with something decent in your kitchen at home, with only the wishy-washy English winter and a cluttered garage for cold-conditioning.

Our most recent effort was supposed to be a clone of Pilsner Urquell (pilsner malt, Urquell yeast, Saaz hops) but turned out to be a cloudier and a little sweeter. Drinking it in the sun, we were taken back instantly to the beer gardens and halls of Nuremberg, Wuerzburg, Bamberg, Augsburg and… well, you get the picture.  It was rough around the edges but very alive. We’re chuffed to bits and will be drinking it all summer, if we can make it last.

Categories
homebrewing

The joy of parti-gyling

birthdaybeer

We’d been playing with the idea of a parti-gyle brew for a while.  This is where you take the first lot of sugary liquid from the mashed grain to make a strong beer. You then run more water over it to flush out any remaining sugar and that  second, less-sugary liquid is used to make a weaker beer.  Here’s  an old article by Randy Mosher on how to do it.

When I hit upon the idea of brewing Bailey a surprise birthday beer, I knew I couldn’t brew an entire batch in secret, but I could hide a small carboy of beer. So, part-gyling seemed the natural way forward.

I was definitely impressed by the results, and I think Bailey was too (well, he can’t say he doesn’t like his birthday present, can he?).   More excitingly though, it showed us that parti-gyling is pretty straightforward and allows you to experiment a lot more on brew day and make two very different beers with only a little extra effort.

Full details on how I made the beers can be found after the jump.

Categories
homebrewing london

Snow

snowbrew

As you will have gathered from various other blogs, we had a spot of snow last week in London.  We both made it into work, as much as anything to see central London completely covered in snow and silent, except for the ringing of church bells.  It was marvellous.

There is a beer link.  Having already taken advantage of the cold weather to get a couple of lagers brewed, today we used the remnants of our snowman to help cool our wort.

The photo above shows are slightly idiosyncratic method of chilling the wort.  We usually fill the massive saucepan with ice, but snow is cheaper.  This method chills the wort in about 20-25 minutes, which is quicker than putting the kettle in a bath of ice.  We do have one of those wort chillers but we’ve never used it as we couldn’t be bothered to get a pipe that fitted, and this method seems to work just as well.

Categories
Blogging and writing homebrewing

Pub in a shed

If you’re in the UK and into beer, have a look at this on the BBC I-player; fellow beer blogger John and his shed are featured.

This is no ordinary shed – Darlington-based John and his friends have all converted their sheds into mini-pubs serving homebrew.  BBC’s regional programme “Inside out” picked it up.

You could learn more about beer watching this than the whole series of James & Oz, and it makes home-brewing look seriously cool.

The bit you want is about 20 minutes into the show.