When you get shiny new stuff, it's important to try it out. The Electrim boiler has now been designated the hot liquor boiler to feed the mash tun and stovetop boiler, and tubing has been obtained and modified for an assortment of purposes. It's currently filling the conservatory and causing my wife concern.
Also, after a few weeks of inconclusive fiddling with Brewzor on my Android tablet, I have decided to have a look at BeerSmith, which seems to be the industry standard for brewing software. There's an open beta version for Ubuntu, which is my desktop of choice so I'm happy to give it a go. After a bit of tinkering, the recipe that I came up with was this:
- 18.93l of water
- 3.10kg Maris Otter pale malt
- 0.24kg 60L crystal malt
- 38g Challenger hops
- 7g Styrian Goldings hops
- 1 sachet Nottingham yeast
- 3g irish moss
My first mashing experience went pretty well I think: I preheated the tun as suggested and tried to be reasonably accurate with water temperatures for the mashing and sparging and it produced about 17 litres of wort. I had a couple of tap and tube spills as my improvised but not unreasonable sparge arm pipe adaptor (an inch or so of half-inch pipe with the quarter-inch sparge arm pipe clipped inside with a jubilee clip) popped off the liquor tank tap a couple of times - a butterfly clip for the tap end should fix that.
Boiling was less so - even from about 70 degrees it took a good hour for the wort to come up to the boil on our elderly gas hob and I ended up adding the hops a bit early out of impatience, but once it did boil it was good for an hour, the Styrings got added at the end and it rested for half an hour before being transferred to a fermentation bin to cool overnight. Some kind of cooling mechanism is definitely needed. I also remembered to take a measure of OG and taste this time, and got an OG of 1040. It's a little darker than No 1 and a little more bitter.
I aerated the wort and pitched the yeast this morning. Nottingham seems less lively than Safale-04 and I haven't yet heard any tell-tale blooping from the back bedroom but a quick check of the bucket through the airlock hole confirms that a krauzen is forming. As we're on holiday the week after next it may sit for a fortnight, or I might capitulate and get a cask and try something else.