Beer and Brewing

We’ve got a lot of old, used bottles and they need to be clean before we can re-use them for our home brew. We’ve noticed that bottles we thought were clean showed up streaks and spots once beer had been in them for a while. We’ve not had any infections but we were taking risks.

We can’t afford to buy new bottles for every batch and, while we’re kegging a reasonable amount, we’re going to need bottles for higher strength or long-term beers.

We’ve embarked upon a stricter cleaning regime involving soaking in VWP, scrubbing with a bottle brush and rinsing with Starsan.

Unfortunately, we’re still finding bottles with streaks of muck (yeast?) down the sides and around the ‘shoulders’. It was time to find a cleaner and approach that worked more reliably.

The candidates were:

• Aerial washing powder. This is a pretty good cleaner and has removed strong stains in the past.
• Fairy liquid. Again, it’s proved itself in the past.
• VWP. Our usual cleaner for brewing equipment.
• BrewClean. An alternative cleaner that we’ve used in the past for thorough kit cleaning.
• Bruzyme. This professes to be good at cleaning biological materials.
• Caustic soda. The ultimate heavy duty cleaner.

A little bit of each was put into two bottles which had proved stubborn to clean and left for 24 hours.

The first to be eliminated was, surprisingly, the Caustic soda. One bottle wasn’t clean, the other was debateable. Two others, the Aerial and the Fairy, also failed to clean one of the bottles.

This leaves just the VWP, BruClean and Bruzyme. Future testing will use these but we don’t expect VWP to be the best choice.

A quick note to say that if you’re currently using an iSpindel, or are planning to, then made sure that your batteries are legitimate. There are chinese knockoffs on the market and they can be dangerous. More importantly, they mean that your iSpindel will be less accurate.

Legitimate batteries are never more than 3500mAh and weight over 42g.

These should be suitable:

https://www.buyabattery.co.uk/rechargeable-batteries/rechargeable-18650-li-ion-batteries/gp-18650-3-7v-li-ion-rechargeable-battery-3350mah-69mm-protected.html#search:query=18650

https://www.batterystation.co.uk/rechargeable-batteries/high-recharge-cycle-rechargeable-batteries.html

I’ve created a page which explains why using Influx and Grafana with your iSpindel could be a better options than using UbiDots. You’ll need a local server running linux and some linux experience. The installation and basic configuration is covered.

Well, both Pen and I are now working from home for the foreseeable future. So, time to figure out what we’re going to brew 🙂

Actually, we were already planning on a double brew day in early April. This may move to a week day as we reckon it’ll be easy enough to work around a typical brew day.

Next two beers: A clone of Erdinger Dunkelweiss and a NEIPA. The Erdinger is based on various information found on Erdinger’s website and on various forums. As for the NEIPA, Tiny Rebel provided a description of a suitable process for designing and making theirs. We’ve had to fill in the ingredients gaps.

Beyond that, we’re getting sack of Maris and we’ve already got a fridge full (and more) of malt, yeast and hops. The general plan is to try to use up what we’ve got. We’ll run out of bottles and kegs before we run out of ingredients.

We stopped the hazelnut extract at 5ml (or 0.33ml per litre). It’s not as strong a flavour as in the original beer but it’s as strong as Pen wants it. It’s been bottled and is slowly carbonating in the cellar.

This week is Manchester Beer and Cider Festival week and Brass Castle have many of their beers on tap there. It was too good an opportunity to pass up and we bottled a half to take home. Now Pen and do a direct comparison of our version with theirs. The most obvious difference right now is that ours isn’t anywhere near as Hazelnutty. Pen thinks she’d probably prefer less of the nut flavour. We’re gradually increasing, 0.5ml at a time, the extract addition to our brew. We’ll see where we stop.

The second brew of the weekend was another attempt at Rich’s Ruud Kow. The first version is still sat in the cellar in a plastic barrel letting the Brett do its job. In another year it’ll be ready for its next adventure.

The reason we’re doing another so soon is because we want to try blending in a few years time. A common approach is to take three Flanders Reds of different ages and then blend them in desirable ways. This is the second of the three.

Originally it was going to be completely identical to the first but circumstances dictates a diversion. Due to a mistake with our Malt Stock spreadsheet we were short 400g of Vienna malt. We tried to source it from Steve but he didn’t have any. In the end we substituted with 500g of Mild malt, which we had in for the Hazelnut Mild.

As with the Hazelnut Mild, efficiency was up a little. We were aiming for 70% efficiency but finished up with about 74% (translates to about 86% brewhouse efficiency).

Another double brewing weekend has just passed. Thus we have a Hazelnut Mild fermenting away in our utility room. All went according to plan. Last Thursday we made a starter from the WLP013 London Ale yeast in our new 2L Erlenmeyer flask. We’ve got a cheap stir plate and a selection of stir bars. It whirred away for 24 hours and then spent a night in the fridge to settle out.

On Friday we weighed everything out. At 7.30 on Saturday morning the HLT went on and we were finished by 14.00. The process was the same as usual. There were some small changes: the malts used were mostly new to use and we use our new “hop spider” to keep the hops from clogging up the filter in the boil kettle. It worked well. No problems with the draining and we were able to squeeze more liquid out than usual.

The main thing to note is that our efficiency shot up. Normally we work to 63% of sugar content (which is 75% of 85% – 85% being the accepted maximum extraction and 75% being typical brewhouse efficiency). Due to improvements I’d increased this to 65% for this brew. Afterward we calculated the efficiency to be over 81%. There are many possible reasons for this.

1. The extraction values for the malts used were wrong and low.
2. Our water/malt ratio is 4:1, which is high and is supposed to give higher extraction.
3. Less loss due to the hop spider.
4. Our measurements were wrong.

81% translates to a brewhouse efficiency of 98%. *shrugs*

The lager is in the cellar finishining its fermentation. Two weeks of 14C and a slow fermenting yeast. There have been some strong H2S smells coming from it. Now it appears to have finished. It’ll be tested and put in a corny keg over the weekend. After 4-6 weeks in the garage we’ll have a better idea how it’ll come out.

It’s looking a lot darker than we expected. It had a long (90m) boil with the top open so maybe it caramelised a bit.

All went according to plan, except that we finished up with more than expected. The boiling didn’t evaporate enough water so we had 700ml extra. Fortunately the efficiency was higher so the OG was as expected. The FG was actually a fair bit lower. I guess the WLP002 did much better than expected (normally 63-70%, actual 79%). Maybe the small starter helped.

Currently it’s being forcibly carbonated. Not sure when Pen will test it as she’s trying Dry January.