After 4 pretty strong brews and endless small brewing mistakes possibly caused by drinking said brews I decided it was time to try and brew something a little weaker. I also felt confident enough with the equipment to progress to trying to create my own recipe. My goals for the recipe were pretty simple, I wanted it to come out and < 4% and I wanted it to give a lovely hoppy hit. Unfortunately for me, I had no idea what I was doing and this was the first recipe I came up with based on an adaptation of an American IPA recipe:
Marris Otter 3kg
Centennial 30g 60
Centennial 20g 10
Simcoe 18g 10
Centennial 44g 0
Simcoe 44g 0
Safale US-05
That would have gave me a 3.7% beer with 55.7 IBUs. At this point I knew nothing of the need to balance the bitterness from the hops with the sweetness from the malt but luckily for me I posted the recipe on The Home Brew Forum and a couple of the guys over there pointed out that the bitterness probably wouldn’t suit such a weak beer. After a couple more iterations, first using Brewers Friend and then Beer Smith I had something I was pretty happy with although I was concerned such a weak beer might come out a little thin so I increase the mash temp to 67c and adjusted the recipe again to get the ABV back up so this is what I ended up with:
Marris Otter 3.3kg
Crystal 0.2kg
Centennial 10g 60
Centennial 10g 10
Simcoe 20g 10
Centennial 40g 0
Simcoe 40g 0
Safale US-05
ABV: 3.4%
27.6 IBUs
As I bought 100g packs of Simcoe and Centennial I have 40g of each to dry hop with if I feel it needs it.
Finally, after weeks of tweaking I was ready to go. I’d noticed in the GrainFather instructions that you needed to adjust the mash water for < 4kg brews but it turned out that was very simple, I just measured my mash and sparge water as per usual and then topped up the boiler with water from the sparge water so it came above the top plate.
As this was my 5th brew I thought I knew how to use the machine properly but, because I’d been reading a bit on brewing recently, I spotted a mistake I’d made on my first 4 brews. When the grain has been added for the mash I hadn’t been changing the boiler setting to Mash as when I’d first read the instructions I didn’t have a clue what a saccharification mash was and the instructions weren’t particularly clear in stating you need to switch the boiler setting. Either way, it doesn’t seem to have caused any noticeable problems with previous brews and I’ll know for future.
Other than that the brew was going swimmingly until I picked up my sample tube in a home brew haze and didn’t realise my hydrometer was inside! I guess I’ll never know just how sessionable this beer is! I managed to finish the brew in 4:45 which is significantly quicker that previous brews, I have no idea where I saved time tho.
As I’ve had the GrainFather for a decent amount of time now I’ll be putting together a quick review in the next few days.
Northern Code Monkey 