Time for a brew. Have to have something to drink to celebrate getting the mash tun made after all, so I put as much of my old kit back into service as I needed. This brew was a beer called “Wee Bee”, posted on the Jim’s Beer Kit forum. Quoted from the original posting there, the details are:
Quantities shown are for making 23l or 5 imp gallons.
Pale Malt 4300g – 87.4%
Dingemans Special B – 500g – 10.2%
Torrefied Wheat 120g – 2.5%CHINOOK hops (quantities shown are for 13% aa)
35g for 60 mins – 47 IBUs
25g for 20 mins – 20 IBUs
20g for 10 mins – 10 IBUs
20g at flame out – 0 IBUsOG 1.048, FG 1.010, ABV 4.9% (@ 75% brewhouse efficiency)
IBUs = 77
Colour – 56 EBCs
Your choice of yeast, but this Works well with Nottingham/Gervin
Here’s all the (pre-milled) grain in the mash tun:
And to keep the heat in for the mash, it all gets wrapped up:
After 90 minutes mashing I bodged my sparging arm onto the tube connected to the HLT:
I take the first litre or two from the mash tun tap and return it to the top just to allow the wort to run clear into a bin:
I’ve never been able to get this sort of rolling boil going with five gallons in my previous boiler as it would just have overflowed.
And with the lid on, all the steam is piped nicely out of the window so the beer shack doesn’t fill up with condensation.
I had a little more than planned when the boil was finished and the wort run off to cool, so I transferred a little to a demijohn to ferment (and I couldn’t resist a little taste, for quality control, obviously).