, assisted by a curious friend! The aim was a 5L batch size, to fit a regularly available 5L plastic drinking-water can.
My reasoning behind the tiny batch size is to promote experimentation and learning the brew craft and process (and admittedly also inspired by Swedish web shop "Det Lilla Köksbryggeriet" that sell extract/partial mash recipes to absolute beginner brewers).
I wanted to pitch a BIAB SMaSH APA (powered by BIABacus) against the ready-made (fool proof?) partial mash APA recipe ordered from "DLK", for comparison.
I also decided to do no-chill and pitch the yeast into the cube after cooling, inspired by a colleague at work.
Brew day went pretty well, with some minor (hopefully) problems:
- We forgot to start the timer a couple of times, forcing us to estimate time left for these steps. This should not be too big of a deal.
- My oven thermometer was not up to the task. Halfway through mashing it messed up the temperatures, potentially throwing our mashing temperatures off a bit. I switched to my BBQ thermometer which worked, but could not be left inside the liquid.
- Evaporation was lower than estimated by BIABacus, or less water was lost to malt and bag (our VFO was higher than estimated). But that also allowed us to leave more nasty stuff in the kettle, so no real waste in the end I believe.
- I missed some measurements that I could've entered into BIABacus: VIB, GiB
Today I pitched the dry yeast into our tiny "cubes". Now only time can tell what the result will be.
Will update in about a month with results!
. The BIABacus defaults are aimed at getting you on the safe side of things which means you'll hopefully end up with a bit more than you expect. Being within two gravity points is great and you should not expect to hit your exact gravity on a brew day. Why?...
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