First brew in my [second hand] G30. It's a fairly old model (that came with a manual controller), but that's not the issue.
First thing I did wrong was not fit the overflow pipe properly. However, the recirculation water was draining nicely through the grain, so I don't think this was an issue either.
Removed grain basket and poured sparge water through. All OK so far. Then went to boil. Again, all OK. Added hops directly into the wort (not using a bag or a spider). This is where it started to go wrong, I think.
Boil finished. I then took my whirlpool paddle and did about 30s of whirlpooling in the G30. The filter at the bottom came off during this process.
This, of course, meant that the pump got blocked during chilling. So I'm now stuck with hot wort and no way to empty the G30. Came up with the idea to sanitise an old fermentation bucket and syphon it into there, which I did.
So now I've got a bucket of hot wort and no way of chilling it. Decide that the only way of reducing its temperature is to transfer it to my fermenter (a GF30) and let it cool naturally. Took about 2 days to cool to fermentation temperature.
Drop my iSpindel into the fermenter and it's giving me a SG of 1.0147. Verified this using a hydrometer.
Questions:
1. Is it worth wasting some yeast trying to get this to ferment?
2. Is my SG too low because I screwed up with the overflow pipe, or some other reason?
3. Will the very slow cooling (and possible introduction of excessive bacteria from syphoning into bucket etc) result in a completely undrinkable beer?
The long and short of this is that, while I'd love have brewed a delicious batch of Old Speckled Hen (which this was supposed to be), I can put this down to a learning experience.
I'm now considering various mods for the G30, such as an external filter and to replace the pump (this G30 is about 10 years old and has done about 40 or 50 brews before I bought it). But for my next brew, I'm definitely using a hop spider...
First thing I did wrong was not fit the overflow pipe properly. However, the recirculation water was draining nicely through the grain, so I don't think this was an issue either.
Removed grain basket and poured sparge water through. All OK so far. Then went to boil. Again, all OK. Added hops directly into the wort (not using a bag or a spider). This is where it started to go wrong, I think.
Boil finished. I then took my whirlpool paddle and did about 30s of whirlpooling in the G30. The filter at the bottom came off during this process.
This, of course, meant that the pump got blocked during chilling. So I'm now stuck with hot wort and no way to empty the G30. Came up with the idea to sanitise an old fermentation bucket and syphon it into there, which I did.
So now I've got a bucket of hot wort and no way of chilling it. Decide that the only way of reducing its temperature is to transfer it to my fermenter (a GF30) and let it cool naturally. Took about 2 days to cool to fermentation temperature.
Drop my iSpindel into the fermenter and it's giving me a SG of 1.0147. Verified this using a hydrometer.
Questions:
1. Is it worth wasting some yeast trying to get this to ferment?
2. Is my SG too low because I screwed up with the overflow pipe, or some other reason?
3. Will the very slow cooling (and possible introduction of excessive bacteria from syphoning into bucket etc) result in a completely undrinkable beer?
The long and short of this is that, while I'd love have brewed a delicious batch of Old Speckled Hen (which this was supposed to be), I can put this down to a learning experience.
I'm now considering various mods for the G30, such as an external filter and to replace the pump (this G30 is about 10 years old and has done about 40 or 50 brews before I bought it). But for my next brew, I'm definitely using a hop spider...
