Double Brew Day - Double lesson learned day. On strike temperatures for mashing

This was meant to be a blog post on the double brewday that I did yesterday. I finally got round to re-brewing the Nelson Sauvin stout that I brewed in January for AG0010, and then whilst I was brewing that, I tasted a bottle of AG0020, the First Love, Fruit Salad IPA. It was bitter as all hell as I’d not scaled the amount of hops with the lower grist bill.

It was meant to be a discussion on all of that, but it’s not going to be. That may be later, today, this blog post is about a very important lesson I learned yesterday. Mash Strike Temperatures.

Gyle 21 - AG Winner Staison

As with most of my brews, I get an initial idea from somewhere, can be a conversation, can be something I've read. That will make me want to brew a particular style of beer. This is then matched to what ingredients I've got, and what makes it interesting to me.

Howto: How I do my brewing calculations, and my Brew Sheet.

Everyone has a different way to record what and how they brew, it's the only way you can both be consistent, and get better at what you do. Initially, I started out trying different brewing apps and software like the majority of people out there in homebrew land, but it left me feeling underwhelmed, and uniformed.

Then I saw a tweet by matthew clark ‏(@thornbridgematt) that said "Homebrewers! Ditch those brew calculators and learn to work it out by hand. http://tiny.tw/38L9 "

Gyle 20 - AG First Love Fruit Salad IPA

The premise for this started with a twitter discussion with @ColinStronge (Buxton Breweries Chief Copper Monkey) where he rather poetically said that he loved Simcoe like it was his first love. So I decided to do a brew with Simcoe in honour of first loves.

Gyle 14 - Triskel Pale Ale - tasting notes

I’m finding the bottles a little too carbonated upon opening, they are foaming a bit, but the yeast isn’t being thrown up, so it’s all good at the moment. 

Gyle 13a - Brett Pale ale - tasting notes

On the 23rd of March I brewed Gyle 13 - Bramling X SMaSH Pale Ale (details of that to come soon), and as I had been building up a culture of Brettanomyces yeast from bottle dregs (3 Fontainen and Cantillon to be precise) I threw in a couple of kilograms of MO pale malt to the spent grains from Gyle 13 and did another mash whilst Gyle 13 was boiling.

Gyle 19 - AG Red Chinook Saison

I was going to have a quiet day, I did a bit of reading, the usual. What I was reading was making me want to brew. I finally decided at about 6:30 this evening to start heating up some strike water and come up with a recipe. The recipe I decided on (at such late notice) was a very simple saison, single hopped with Chinook.