Brewing went well. A few recent items helped improve the process;
- Tap adapter for the laundry sink meant no need to run the hose through the window and more importantly I could turn the cooling tap on and off without needing to run outside.
- Mash /aeration paddle worked great for mashing in and for aeration during transfer. The hop basket was a bit in the way at the end, but managed to fit all the things in.
- larger hop basket with courser filter meant hop muck was nicely contained but I don’t think much less in the way of extraction – I was able to run the recirculation arm into the hop basket for the flame out to cooling.
- keg lube – this has helped with the new bottom jar fittings and sealing without needing to over tighten. Should have been using this the entire time!
For the recipe I tasted the malts at the brew shop and identified the redback as a flavour I wanted to reduce from the last brew. So I removed it and replace with toffee malt that has been working very well recently. I doubled the amount of eclipse wheat from 50g to 100g to maintain the darker colour. For the hops I included nectaron along with the mosaic and Riwaka, to help round out the flavour and aroma, and nectaron seemed to work magic with the toffee malt in a previous brew. Yeast is back to the BRY-97 West Coast Ale from lallemand.
Brew went well with 25L in fermenter and no top up, giving a high SG of 1.064.
Day 4:
fermentation going very well, SG at 1.015. Foam nearly overflowed but stayed just below the top, I think the 10psi and 18C helped.
Day 5:
Opened the valve to drop the trub and let it settle out. Gravity slowing down at 1.014. pressure 10psi and temp 18C.
Day 6:
Removed the jar and extracted some of the yeast, more hop particles in this one (ones that were fine enough to make it through the hop basket mesh). Will rinse it like the last lot and see how it goes.
Gravity between 1.014 and 1.013.
Cleaned and added the jar back to the fermzilla to later use to remove and seal hop muck.
Added 150g total dry hop, 50g if each.
Raised temp to 20C.
