I'm moving house soon,
so i've not brewed in a while. I quite miss having a fermenter
bubbling away in 'Breezer' (brew freezer) and had a few hours to
spare so I decided to make a beer.
Time and space were
constraints, so I went for a mini batch that I could make on the hob
with normal pans. It would be improvised to say the least. So here's
what I came up with;
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| Malt Bill |
900g pale malt
150g amber malt
50g Cara-Hell malt
40g Torrified wheat
7g Challenger hops @ 60
mins
5g Amarillo hops @ 10
mins
5g Cascade hops @ 5
mins
5g Amarillo hops @ 0
mins
Wilko Gervin yeast
I started by heating up
4L to strike temperature (76c) and laced the pan with a square of
polyester voile (the type you can make a net curtain out of). I then
doughed in my malt, tied the tops of the bag together with a strip of
the same material and put in the oven, preheated at about 60-70c. I
did this because I knew being such a small volume, it would loose
heat really quickly and mightn't totally convert the starches in the
malt to sugar. It started at 67c and actually rose a little to 69c after an hour in the oven.
I then sparged, which was a bit of a
challenge without my usual sparge arm. I improvised by sitting a
pizza tray on top of the pot, with a colander containing the malt bag
on top of that. I slowly poured another 2l of warm water over the
top of the grains, which trickled through the now compact grain bed,
rinsed the extra sugars and drained into the pot. When the pot was
full I put the heat on and brought it to a boil.
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| Ghetto sparge |
When the rolling boil
started, I added my first hop addition. After half an hour or so, a
fair bit of the wort had evapourated, so I topped up with boiled
water from the kettle. Probably another litre or so. The next addition was
a pinch of irish moss, then the remaining hops.
After the hours boil, I
put the pan in a sink of ice water to chill to pitching temperatures,
then syphoned into an empty 5l water bottle. I had earlier added some
Starsan to the water and used it to sanitise my equipment and drilled
a hole in the lid for an airlock, flanked on each side by a rubber
seal. I gave it a good shake to add some oxygen and sprinkled half a
packet of yeast I bought from Wilkos earlier that day on top.
And there we have it, a
couple of hours in the kitchen, making beer with no brewing equipment
used at all, except the syphon.
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| Ice bath cooling |
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| Morrisons fermenter |
If I did it again, I
would adjust the recipe to liquor back to 4.5L in the bottle. I halved the amount of water I started with by the end of it. I must have lost best part of a litre to the
grain, some to the hops, plenty to evaporation and a little spilt on
the floor when I was putting it in the bottle. I probably only got
3.5L or wort over all, which will probably only make 6 or 7 bottles
of beer after the trub in the 'fermenter'. Admittedly, I was never
going to get too much out of it, and it's not an economical way of
brewing in terms of cost or time spent per pint, but it was good fun,
a good challenge of my improvisational skills and a good way of
soothing the brewing blues after a while out of the game.
Cheers!
