Hello,
thought I'd share my first ever brew day here. And it was a BIAB as well, surprise...
Anyway, here's how it went. I selected one of the simplest recipes from Brewing classic styles - the ordinary bitter. The original intent was to brew on my stovetop on a new 30 cm kettle that I scored on a sale, so that I could keep equipment expenses minimal, while I got my bearings around the brewing process.
As with many good intentions...
It turned out the ceramic electric stovetop in my flat is to puny to boil water properly in a kettle this size. I don't know what the actual power of it is, but assuming 1.8 kW, it would barely be enough power to cover evaporation, never mind all the rest of the losses.
So I found a nice 18 cm gas burner off a bloke from a local classified webpage. And once I sourced all the ingredients, the new adventure could begin. Brewing on the balcony of my flat, of course the wind was giving me trouble, but after I improvised with a baking tray and some other stuff I had lying around, I got that under control as well.
I was aiming at 7 L into the fermenter, but in the end I got 8. My OG was also a bit low, at 1.033 instead of the recipe's 1.038. I'm guessing it has to do with a bit lower evaporation, since my VFO was roughly half a litre more than it should've been according to BIABacus. Maybe it was the wind messing with the burner (and it was not that warm outside either - around 12 °C)...
After chilling the wort for about an hour in the kitchen sink, I got it down to 22 °C, poured it into the fermenter through a sieve and pitched the SAFALE-04.
The taste so far was nice, altough quite bitter, but I guess that should go down a bit in the next couple of weeks.
I'm attaching a picture of the boil, the only one I have of the day. Maybe I will be more diligent in this respect next time.
So far I'm excited, now let's hope for the best during the next stages.
First brew day story
Post #1 made 8 years ago
Last edited by bejkee on 07 Mar 2016, 03:13, edited 1 time in total.
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