Mash Mash 70C for 60min Sparge 78C for 15min

Began my vacation by brewing an english low abv. bitter. It was raining so it got a bit cold to brew outside, but a bit of rain and cold weather can't slow down a brewer. I started by warming up the water to desired temperature and added the malts (pilsner and crystal 50). One hour mash. Now I was also able to test my used to be fermentation bucket, now sparge water heater bucket for the first time. With this we are now heat larger amounts of sparge than. This means we are able to get the grist/water ratio correct. Sparging went good even if it took a lot longer than usual as I had to go feed my boy. When I had a rolling boil I added Fuggles and some leftover Hallertau Mittelfrüh at the beginning. No aroma hops was used, because I wanted this to be a traditional bitter. The brewhouse effiency went once again over 90%. Yeah! Now we are only waiting for the fermentation to end so that we can have this bottled. I have big hopes for this and will enjoy this in august when the summer finally arrives.

Where to begin? We were going to brew outside for the first time, so we were hoping for nice weather. This was the first thing that didn't go as planned. It was raining and the wind was blowing, but warm clothes helps. Then our PID started to give an olAD error message and it took about an hour to find the fault that was an loose wire. And lastly we had to bring with us a couple of vital components to the wort cooler, so we couldn't chill our wort. Those were the bad things everything else was fun. So it was a fun brewday as always. We finally got a much better mash effiency by doing the sparge much slower. Have to check tomorrow what the effiency was, but we got a higher OG than planed. Sadly there were no time to take any pictures during the brew, but to the next time I will try to priority that. Now time for a whisky to warm my body with.

We are preparing ourselves for the next brew. Making a starter with our newly built stir plate that seems to work great. In a couple of days we will be brewing a saison. Really looking forward to the brew day.

Spent the evening by steeping different things to our mead. Black currants turned out the best. The one with ginger would have needed a bit more ginger in it, or something else to compensate the ginger flavour. Mango was also used, but I think I need to find more fresh mango. The experiments continues…

Our American Brown Ale is looking good

Ready for the yeast pitching.

At the beginning of saccharification rest for the German Pils.