One of the things that has, well, worried me about home brewing is the quantities involved, so while I've amassed my standard 5 gallon/23 litre setup, I couldn't help thinking that it's a lot of liquid even allowing that a bottle will be good for a year or so. When I can get back into the garage I'm going to get rid most of the 30 or so bottles of brew No1 simply because N02 proved that I could do better, it probably isn't going to get much better, and I could use the bottles.
My sister mentioned to me that she had been reading the blog and that she used to get kits, made up by a brewing shop in our home town of Doncaster, that contained the ingredients to make five litres or so of beer, so I got to thinking that I could do something similar, scaling quantities for, say a 10 or 12 litre pot. This is where Brewsmith came into its own. While reducing a brew bill from a 19L profile to a 12L profile should be a case of maths, Brewsmith does the calculations to get an idea of the colour of the beer, its bitterness units, and its original gravity, so with a couple of evenings tinkering, and waiting while we got our new floor down, I came up with a couple of small batch recipes to have a go at.
No 3 is designed to be a lowish ABV blonde beer using a packet of 2009 Summit hops that I got on sale from The Malt Miller. After a bit of thought I augmented that with some Challenger for the whole of the boil, and Cascade for aroma. The torrified wheat is for head retention:
- 12l water
- 1.25kg Maris Otter
- 0.10kg torrified wheat
- 6g Challenger hops
- 7g Summit hops
- 3g Cascade hops
- quarter of a teaspoon of Irish moss
- Half a packet of Safale S-04
There were a few difficulties, mostly with gravity assistance. A small batch in a large Eskimo mash tun probably isn't very efficient, but I mashed in at 65 degrees for 75 minutes and sparged with a combination of the sparge arm and hot liquor vessel and just pouring water over the mash because of the lack of height of both the liquor tank and the mash tun. I got about 9l of wort in the end though at an initial gravity of 1030, a little bit less than calculated but in the right area.
Then it was time for this brew's new toy, the immersion chiller. It's an off the peg Brewpak one, but the price was good and it only needed an adaptor to fit over our elderly mixer tap, sourced from our local hardware shop once I'd realised what it actually was I needed. Once connected it got the wort down to pitching temperature in about 25 minutes. I put it into a 10 litre fermenting bin via the old faithful colander, pitched the yeast and brought it upstairs where it's now bubbling away reassuringly next to my desk. The wort tasted good out of the copper: a subtle mix of bitterness and fruitiness with a sharp finish. It's a good colour as well, about 6-7 EBC. The proof will come in a week or so when I come to rack and bottle but it's looking promising so far.
So what have I learned this time? Small batches seem to work in the same way as less small ones. I need my mash tun to be higher, and my liquor tank higher still, which will be borne in mind when I get the workbench built in the garage. When I get space in the garage. I'd quite like to turn the 12L pot into a proper boiler but I'm no good at things like that and it's not as difficult to manhandle via a handy sieve as the big pot. I'm going to try my other small batch recipe, a stout, next week and then probably come back to No 2, of which more shortly.