Abby Normal Brew Day

I needed to brew an ESB for an upcoming event and I wanted to try an AG Fullers Clone but I decided to try Full Owl ESB. I like it because he makes his own caramelized sugar and I've heard that Fuller's uses brewers caramel. I love these rumors about famous brews and what people think they use. One would think that by now some employee would have had loose lips and we would know definitively the answers to cosmic conundrums like what is the secret ingredient in Guiness, Fullers, and others. I didn't bake my sugar in the oven like the recipe suggested, why follow directions?, instead I used 'The Joy of Cooking' and made caramelized sugar on the stove top... It worked out pretty well but I did determine that hot sugar is freakin' hot. Also you have to keep it on low until you're ready to put it in the kettle or else you end up with a giant sugar rock. I put .5# of sugar in a saucepan and stirred it on low for like 25 min. until it turned into straw colored liquid... I removed it from the heat and slowly added 1/4 of water. I ended up with thick 200 SRM amber liquid, really nice color - I tell ya. Oh and even though SWMBO was sure I '..ruined my good saucepan'. During the boil I filled the sticky messy seemingly ruined saucepan with water and let it sit... about 60 min later all the sugar had dissolved away and the pan was SAVED! Shoo, good thing or I wasn't just going to have to give flowers tomorrow, it would have been flowers and a saucepan.

I decided to stick with my normal Cl to SO4 ratio for my water that I use for my Bitters which is .5 or 1:2 ... I plan on doing some experiments with different Cl to SO4 ratios with UK Bitters to see what ratio acually works best. Extensive ratios like 1:10 and even 1:15 are in some literature but I really wonder about that. I mean Palmer has .5 as bitter and under .35 as very bitter. 1:10 is .1 that has to be extremely bitter. I'm too chicken to cook my ratio up that high but I will try it in my future experiment.
Anyhow I decided to follow on some advice I got and mashed at 151 at a 1qt/lb consistancy, thick I know but it may be more authentic UK mashing... Meanwhile I was so thick that I accidentally mashed my mash tun tube out of it's nut during the first sparge... I stirred too deep I suppose so I got a stuck sparge, joy... I had to dump out about 3 gallons of mash into a fermenter and fix the tube on the bottom of the mash tun. I have a false bottom and there is a tube that runs from the valve to the bottom and it can become displaced. That was special, let me tell you...
Once I got that all together I was happy to see my initial gravity was higher than I predicted. I was supposed to get 7 gal. at 1.047 and got 1.054 ... this had to have been due to the fact that I'm now grinding my own and used my new barley crusher I got for my b-day. When all was said and done today I got 78% which is about 5% higher than usual.
Have I mentioned that I love Maris Otter? The smell, the taste, the hot and cold breaks... very nice.
I'm using Wyeast 1968 and made a starter. I've been dumping my starters in when they are at the height of krausen or thereabouts and I'm getting fermentation w/in a few hours of pitching like this. I know people usually decant the wort off the starter but I just toss it all in, in fact I almost always toss the stir bar in with it because by the time I pitch, 6 hours after I've begun, I'm so tired I don't remember the bar...
Today during the session I was drinking my guiness clone and I tell ya... Riclarke's recipe that uses 4-5 day old soured guiness added to the end of the boil really makes it incredible. I don't have nitrogen but I primed w/DME and I'm getting creamy heads that leave a major history behind. Amazing brew...

Until next brew...