Brew Session 001 - My First Brew

On Saturday 29th September I did my first All Grain brew session. I attempted an American style Pale Ale, but as I attempted to develop my own receipe I will have to wait to see what comes out.





The receipe I came up with is as follows.

Ingredients.

Maris Otter - 7lb
Pearl Malt - 3lb
Caramunich Malt - 5oz
Crystal Malt - 5oz
Aromatic Malt - 5oz

Hops - All East Kent Goldings

1.5oz - 60mins
1oz - 15mins
1.5oz - flameout (0mins)

The brew went reasonable well for a first attempt. I hit the mash temp of 153oF perfectly and lost no more than 1 degree over the 1hour mash. Unfortunatly due to measuring problems I do not know what volume of water to grain was in the mash.

Also another porblem was I forgot to add the 5.2ph stabaliser to the mash until 10minutes in.

I also mis-calucated the amount of water needed in the HLT so after sparging with all the water vailble I only ended up with 5 UK gallons in the boiler pre boil. Pre-boil gravity was 1.041. Due to the low starting volume, boil off and the gallon lost to the bottom of the boiler I only ended up with just short of 3 gallons in the fermentor at a gravity of 1.054. Fermenting with Dry Yeast Safale US05 with I rehydrated prior to pitching. The wort was oxygenated for 30 minutes in the fermentor using a aquarium pump with a hepa filter attached to a stainless steel airstome.

However, I am happy with the overall result for a first attept. For future brew I need better control over the volumes of water in the containers, and ensure I have more water in the HLT that I need.

Only time will tell as to how the receipe turns out.

About me

After I posted my first post showing the photo of my new brewing system i thought I should really post a little about myself.

This is my second attemp at a blog but never really got my first attemp past the first few days of posts. Hopefully this one will not go the same way. But at least I set this one up with a topic in mind.

That topic is homebrew. About 4 months about I bought a basic make you own beer kit and got started in the hobby of homebrew. My first beer was terrible. After that I set out to learn where I went wrong and what I needed to do to put it right. I soon found some great resources on the internet.

Firstly The Brewing Network. The shows I found here (www.thebrewingnetwork.com) where not only very informative but also entertaining.

i also found the forum at www.jimsbeerkit.co.uk.

It turned out that my first beer was fermented far to warm. Once I realised that fermentation temperature control was exteamly important I got myself a used fridge and a temperature controller from ebay and my second beer (Tom Caxton's Real Ale Kit) was much better than my first.

However I quickly realised that All Grain was where I really wanted to go, so I set out saving and planning. I contunued to learn from both reading the forums and listening to The Brewing Network almost non stop. I listed to the shows both in the car and on my iPod at work. When I first started I didn't understand hardly any of what they where talking about. But slowly over time I started to piece things together to get understand the basics of brewing better beer.

I finally manged to complete the system shown in the first post earlier this week, and brewed my first all grain batch. I'll add more details of that in my next post.

New All Grain Brew System Finally Complete

After 3 months of saving and planning I have finally got all the parts of my brew system together.

The stand was cheap shelving bought from Ikea but it works great. The stainless steel containers where from Leyland Home Brew. 50 litre HLT and 50 litre boiler both heated by propane burners.