The finished sparge arm

There are several things I have been wanting to do for a while to help dial in my system and to make brew days, simpler and easier. One of these brew DIY tasks was to make a sparge arm that was suitable for my DIY Thermos cool box Mash Tun. As the cool box is only 37.5 x 24.5 cm internal dimensions, most shop bought sparge arms wont fit.

I had some 15mm copper pipe left over from when I made the manifold for the bottom of the mash tun, Gav (HoppyBrewerUK) has a great video of how to do that.  So it was going to be a copper sparge arm as the pipe was going to be effectively free.

Centre punched corners and 2mm holes

I got a few bits and pieces from Screwfix, (see below for the shopping and cutting list), and started to cut pipe and assemble my first attempt. After trying it for size against the mash tun, I felt the long pipes were a bit close to the sides so cut them down and went for a narrower end design.

After carefully marking out the pipe for a hole every 2cm, I used a centre punch to make sure the drill was not going to wander when it came to drilling the holes. Then went round and drilled each of them. It is just as well I had decided to use 2mm instead of a smaller size as the chuck on my drill wouldn’t have gripped a smaller bit properly.

A little trick you can do with the centre punch is to give it hit on all the fitting joints as you can see in this picture, the resulting dip in the fitting will grip the pipe fairly securely so that it will hold together happily yet still be easy to pull apart if you want to give it a good clean .

Clips cut down to make removal easier

The only other thing that is not immediately obvious from the picture is that I cut down the white plastic pipe clips. This is because they clip the pipe very tightly if you use them without cutting them down, and as I want to be able to unclip the pipe fairly easily so it doesn’t rip screws out of the mounts.

I plan to test it out on Sunday when I brew and will update the post to let you know how it works, if I need to tweak it and how I decided to mount it, as currently I’m torn between just mounting it inside the lid, or on a couple of plastic rails to support it.

I had done several fruity and pale beers so fancied something a bit different for a change. Something fuller flavoured with some good chocolate notes. I don’t use chocolate malt often as my other half seems to be very sensitive to even small amounts of it and doesn’t like the taste. So this time it was a brew just for me.

Whilst you can get some good chocolate flavours from malt, I wanted to help round out the beer and make sure that there was some extra depth of chocolate flavour and aroma in this beer without it being a full on in your face chocolate ale. I had some cocoa nibs here to try and after reading around, it seemed that soaking them in vodka for 24 hours before pitching the nibs and vodka into secondary was the way to go. Some people like to roast the nibs before using them and some don’t. I didn’t want a roast flavour for this beer so decided to skip the roasting.

I’ve added the Beersmith recipe below, but couldn’t find any way to include the vodka in the recipe, so for the record, the nibs were soaked for 48 hours (because primary was a bit slow due to lower than expected temps) in around 200ml of Vodka and then the vodka and cocoa nibs poured into the secondary fermenter whilst transferring the beer from primary.

I’ve just tried this on the 5th of December and am really happy with the result. I just have to leave it alone until Christmas now to let it condition, but after the glass I just had which you can see in the picture above, leaving it alone till then is going to be a challenge.

Here is the Not a Porter Beersmith recipe

Refractometers are great tools for brewers, however they can catch you out if you rely on them all the time. Here, in 5 minutes and under, is when to use them, when not to use them and why.

Brew and enjoy.

18 hours after pitching the Mauribrew 514 Ale Yeast

Brewday again and this time I was looking to do something less fruity and more in line with a basic English Bitter.

I started out with a recipe for a basic brown ale and made a few twists and changes to suit what grains and hops I had here to use up. So instead of using just Pale Ale or 2 Row for the base malt, I ended up adding about 1.5 kilos of Marris Otter just finish up the sack of that and made up the rest of the base malt with Pale Ale malt.

The rest of the grain bill was made up of some Cara-pils, but only had 100g left instead of the 225g I would have liked then some Crystal and chocolate malts.

Hops were going to be all East Kent Goldings, however I had less left than I thought, I must have forgot to click remove inventory in Beersmith on one of my brews, So EKG were used for bittering and Styrian Goldings for the late hops.

Hit the expected gravities on the head again, both pre-boil and post boil and the volumes so good to have shaken of the issues that made me miss gravities on the past couple of brews, and to get the efficiency back up to where it should be.

Quite some time ago I made a wheat beer using Mauribrew yeast, and I thought it did well in that, so I picked up a Mauribrew 514 Ale Yeast and used that for this batch. Rehydrated it and pictured is the overnight results after 18 hours or so.

Looking forward to seeing how this one comes out and I will update you when its ready.

Daftcat ESB recipe

Here at Daft Cat, we are big fans of the Seirra Nevada Pale Ale. I was asked to brew some, so I went looking for a recipe and came across this SNPA recipe by Mysterio

I was in the process of putting in my grain order from The Malt Miller when I saw they actually had a recipe pack for it, so I added that and a wlp001 to the rest of my brew haul which was covered in my Home Brew Wednesday video on 6th March 2013 .

Here is the result of the boil. The hot break was pretty mad but the boil kettle was filled up a bit more than usual.

I actually remembered to get some Camden tabs, so the water was treated to de-chlorinate it this time. Unfortunately I managed to miss my pre boil gravity by 3 points and the post boil by 4 so instead of pitching into a 1.058 it was a 1.054

Mysterios SNPA Beersmith recipe

Some updates on what I have brewing, a beer related delivery and a look at the Hop Variety Handbook by Dan Woodske

If you haven’t seen a Poor mans beer gun before or a “making of” video, here is one. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4pWISuhSC7s

Happy Homebrew Wednesday all,

Happy Home Brew Wednesday guys.

Just a few updates on what I have been doing, brewing and what is going to be next up brew wise. Along with a quick look at my kegs and what is on tap at the moment.

Saturday I brewed a 5 imperial gallon batch of MO / Galaxy SMaSH A Single Malt Single Hop Aussie Pale Ale. I have heard it said many times that a good way to get to know your malt and hops is to brew SMaSH that way you can see how a change of malt or a change of hop will affect the beer. So that was what prompted me with this recipe.

I don’t know if I managed to knock my manifold whilst doughing in or what, but when it came to first runnings, I couldn’t get the grain bed to settle and I kept plugging with grain. Turns out that the manifold had come apart at one point letting grain in and this then limited my efficiency as there was a tendency for the sparge water to channel instead of evenly rinse the grains. Thinking about it I could have emptied the mash tun into a fermenter, fixed the manifold, poured it all back in and carry on as normal, however at the time I just made do and ran the wort through a filter bag before putting it into the boiler.  This left me about 7 points down on my pre-boil estimated gravity and about 8 points down on post boil. So I ended up pitching into a 1.040 instead of a 1.048 wort. This is in the fermenting freezer and fermenting well. Galaxy Smash recipe

Just pitched dried yeast into smoky malt

Today I decided to do a small batch Brew In A Bag (BIAB) I had some ingredients here I wanted to use up and thought I would get a bit more experimental and just throw a load of stuff at Beersmith and see what came out. I started with a 22B Smoked Other Beer BJCP class And looked to see what I had that needed using up. So Ended up using Smoked malt, Rye malt, Marris Otter, Cara-pils, East Kent Goldings and a pack of Coopers yeast. may not be a more experienced brewers first choice of combination, however it was what I had to hand that needed using up and a chance to try something different in a small batch. I tried to estimate the volumes needed based on Beersmiths recommendations for a BIAB and ended up with quite a bit too much water so ended up pitching into a 1.048 wort instead of the estimated 1.074 Smoky Malt recipe

So both beers are going to come out lower alcohol than expected but hopefully they will still both be interesting and hopefully nice.

If you watched my Home Brew Wednesday this week, you will see I wasn’t happy with my Chinatu recipe. Whilst it was a lovely beer, it didn’t have the level of flavour and aroma that I was hoping for, so this week we brewed the take 2 batch with some changes to account for the grains I had in stock and also to add 50% more late hops and this time I’ll be dry hopping for a week after the first week of fermentation is done.  I’m looking forward to seeing how much of a difference that makes.

I am starting to get much better at making notes during the brew day, thanks to one of Tiny from Off Tap brewings tips about taking notes.

I noticed that the mash temp had dropped a bit after it had settled down so I had to add another litre of boiling water to get back up to my mash temp.
Also saw that I was just about bang on the pre-boil gravity at 1.044 when the recipe estimate was for 1.043. I was quite surprised to see that my post boil gravity was a bit low at 1.043, but that may be due to my refractometer and really I should have got the hydrometer out before I pitched, but I’m guessing that I did hit the estimated 1.048 as I know my refractometer does some funny things with cool wort.

Anyway, here is the Chinatu II recipe and I’ll update this post with notes and a taste test when the beer is ready.

BeerSmith 2 Recipe Printout - http://www.beersmith.com
Recipe: Chinatu II
Brewer: Sarah
Asst Brewer: 
Style: American Pale Ale
TYPE: All Grain
Taste: (30.0) Yeast pitched at 25 C

Recipe Specifications
--------------------------
Boil Size: 27.88 l
Post Boil Volume: 25.83 l
Batch Size (fermenter): 22.00 l   
Bottling Volume: 20.49 l
Estimated OG: 1.048 SG
Estimated Color: 10.4 EBC
Estimated IBU: 40.2 IBUs
Brewhouse Efficiency: 72.00 %
Est Mash Efficiency: 81.3 %
Boil Time: 60 Minutes

Ingredients:
------------
Amt                   Name                                     Type          #        %/IBU         
4250.00 g             Pale Malt, Maris Otter (4.5 EBC)         Grain         1        91.4 %        
250.00 g              Caramel/Crystal Malt - 40L (40.0 EBC)    Grain         2        5.4 %         
75.00 g               Cara-Pils/Dextrine (3.9 EBC)             Grain         3        1.6 %         
75.00 g               Caramel/Crystal Malt - 100L (100.0 EBC)  Grain         4        1.6 %         
24.00 g               Chinook [13.00 %] - Boil 60.0 min        Hop           5        34.0 IBUs     
1.00 Items            Whirlfloc Tablet (Boil 15.0 mins)        Fining        6        -             
15.00 g               Kohatu [6.80 %] - Boil 10.0 min          Hop           7        4.0 IBUs      
15.00 g               Kohatu [6.80 %] - Boil 5.0 min           Hop           8        2.2 IBUs      
1.0 pkg               Safale American  (DCL/Fermentis #US-05)  Yeast         9        -             
10.00 g               Kohatu [6.80 %] - Dry Hop 7.0 Days       Hop           10       0.0 IBUs      

Mash Schedule: Single Infusion, Light Body, No Mash Out
Total Grain Weight: 4650.00 g
----------------------------
Name              Description                             Step Temperat Step Time     
Mash In           Add 12.13 l of water at 73.8 C          65.6 C        75 min        

Sparge: Fly sparge with 21.35 l water at 75.6 C
Notes:
------
Was short on 40ebc crystal so adjusted recipe
Added 75g cara-pils - adjusted recipe

After 25 mins of mash, rechecked temp and was down to 63 so added 1l boiling water and got temp back to target 65

Created with BeerSmith 2 - http://www.beersmith.com
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Quick brewing tip on how to prevent boil overs