Gyle 39 - Ventura pale

Today’s brew day started out as I had bought some aroma hop oil from The Malt Miller, and wanted to do a side by side comparison. So I devised to brew a batch, ferment it and then split it and dry hop one with hops, and the other with the aroma hop oil.

I decided to brew a batch that would have a 37 litre volume of wort in the fermenting vessels, and I wanted about 5% ABV. I threw together a quick recipe, fairly similar to many that I’ve done. This ended up being 7kg of Crisp Marris Otter pale malt, 500g of light Munich, and 500g of Weyermanns Carapils – all bought from The Malt Miller. At 75% expected efficiency this would give me an OG of 1.049, and an EBC of 11 (SRM 6).

A quick photo to show the "back of house" when brewing, I cover the floor in buckets and bins full of bits and bobs that I will need. It's easier to tidy away afterwards too.

The system was set up and the grain put into the mash tun, then the liquor was put in through the manifold, trying the underletting method. This seemed to work for the most, it kept the husks at the bottom of the MT, and there seemed no dough balls. I did notice that there was quite a big difference in temperature over the MT though. I’d mashed in aiming for 66ºC, and saw that over the MT there was a 2ºC difference. I’ll need to look into this.

I added the following water treatments to the liquor for the mash in, 20 litres of liquor to give a ratio of 2.5:1. Then the sparge water treatment was added to the 35 litres that was used for sparging.

The hopping was not meant to be crazy as I want the dry hop to stand out, both whole hop and oil, so I kept the IBU level low. I did however decide to do the 80ºC hopstand again, so split the flameout addition between them.

The mash was uneventful, I think I ran off a little to quickly, so only got a mash efficiency of 71%, I can live with that. The boil happened, and all hop additions were greatly received. It did take a bit of work to start a 45 litre boil in a 50 litre vessel with no boil over!

The end of the boil was reached and 6 litres was passed through the counterflow wort chiller and then added back into the kettle to bring the temperature down to 80ºC (it actually went to 79ºC) and then more hops were added and left to sit for 20 minutes.

The final run off was a nightmare, slow as you like. The hop filter had got clogged at the bottom of the kettle with the proteins in the wort. This was absolutely infuriating as I had somewhere I wanted to be only a few hours later. I've finished the last sack of the Crisp Marris Otter, so I will be onto the next bag now. If this has the same problem of too much trub in the kettle causing the blockages, I will be changing malt manufacturers.

After what seemed like forever (but probably wasn't) I was frustrated, I got a long steel spoon and put it into the still molten lava-esque wort and moved the dip tube so it wasn't resting against the bottom of the kettle where it was blocked over with the proteins. This didn't seem to help as much as I had wanted.

In such desperation I grabbed the little brown pump that has adorned the parts bin so well for the past however long and finally got round to putting a transformer plug onto it. I rearranged the outlet pipework so that the pump could fit in, and started it running.

Oh. My. God. Why have I not used this before, it was a little tiny brown miracle. I kept the hop filter sticking up to take off the top, and as the wort level dropped I moved the filter down to accommodate. This should be how I do things, it was amazing. I shall be doing a little work to my kit to make it be like this always.

Anyway, so. I got 37 litres into the fermenters, which I pitched with a shit load of the US05 I have sitting around (the Mr Malty website told me I needed lots). This had an OG of 1.048 according to my good hydrometer. I might need to test my refractometer as it read a little lower, even after calibration. This gave me an overall system efficiency of 74%, so not too bad. I love the refractometer for its ease of use, but I trust the hydrometer more as it's a quality Stevenson hydrometer that's lasted me years and been ace.

I shall report back with details of the dry hopping, bottle conditioning, and more importantly the comparison between the oils and the hops. There will be other input from homebrewers as and when they help compare.

Edit - 09/07/2014

I checked this today, and I'm not sure I believe the refractometer as it was reading 1.005 as well, and this was fermented with US-05. I have separated the beer from the trub cakes and I mixed the two together before splitting again for dry hopping. I tasted the beer and it's pretty dry with the lemon and blue cheese that is to be expected from the Sorachi Ace. I had a quick think and decided that I wasn't sure I wanted so much beer tasting like that, as the hop stand really does seem to have brought out big flavours.

With that in mind, and as I had the summit pellets already to hand as I had been dry hopping the summer pale, I stuck in 75g of summit into each CV. Then I added 100g of blitzed sorachi ace into one of the FVs, and I followed the instructions (I know, me following instruction) and added 1ml per 10 litres of the aroma hop oil purchased from The Malt Miller. I decided that I can always add more, but I can't take away. I shall check after I've cold crashed to remove the pellets, and see if it needs any more.