Rough brew day

[Sparkncode]

I wasnt planning to brew today but was in the mood and my knee wasnt too bad but the pain killers probably didnt help with the mess of a brew day.

I brewed a pale ale of 4.7kg ale malt and 250g medium crystal and lots of late motueka hops for a 19l batch.

It started going wrong when i realised near the end of the mash that the reason the water above the grain bed was a little low during recirc was i put 5.7kg of ale malt in instead of 4.7kg. It was already a 5.5% beer.
I decided to change from a 19l batch to a 23l batch but the preboil gravity still came out a little high so i added more water and got it to 4 points too high and decided close enough as i didn't need so much beer. I then backed my boil power off by 5% to reduce the boil off and that guestimation let me hit the OG right on the nose.
To top the day off it took me too long to find the running water sound was the fermenter valve open and not the plate chiller output. Still got about 24l after the loss so plenty.

I even remembered to bump up the hops to cope with the accidental bigger batch.

I think i got better efficiency as well as last brew i adjusted my mill a bit as it had got out of adjustment.

Its now in the fermentation chamber.

Got to love the cloulds of steam from the bk at 80% power on a 4500w element in 6C ambiant evening.


A rough day but pleased i managed to adapt and get there in the end.
The og sample tasted good.

I didnt get the wort as cool as i was hoping. It ended at 28C and i wanted 22C. My whirlpool elbow was pointing too far down from a previous small batch so the bk didnt mix as well as it should have so i had 28C when i thought i had 22C. I shut the hose off before transfer to the fermenter then to avoid over cooling but ended a little warm . Oh well the fermemtation chamber will pull it down to 20C quick enough.

 

[stosh]

Sounds like it was better than a good day at work

I brewed an IPA recently that for whatever reason I decided to boil for 90 minutes. I put all my additions in while mentally using a 60 minute boil instead of looking at my timer and double checking the recipe the way I normally do.

It still made beer. In fact, I gave some to friends and they all reported back that they really liked it and asked when I was making the next batch.

 

[kh54s10]

And here I was expecting hours spent trying to fix something, burned fingers, wort flooded floor or something. All is got were some minor hiccups.

Not exactly as planned but not a bad brew day. And you get beer!

 

[Sparkncode]

Yep could have been worse but it was my worst yet in terms of danger to the beer.
My breaking a bone in my foot setting up for another brew day sucked but didn't risk the beer.

I'm kind of surprised that my home build eHERMS system hasn't caused any problems apart from a failure of a dc pump which is now replaced by 230VAC pumps.
This days issues was down to me and I had only had 1 glass of 4.5% porter before the brew. Its all been pretty smooth once I went to all grain and my eHERMS all at once.

Kind of pleased I managed to compensate and hit the OG at the desired level though, I must be learning something.
Luckily it was a simple recipe so no problem. 14hours later I checked on it and the US-05 has the airlock bubbling away nicely now and its at 19.8C so the fermentation chamber is doing its job. The chamber was on heat. my garage had probably got down to below 6C last night so after cooling down from 28C to 20C its had to heat to keep it up at the target.