I felt like brewing something quite simple but refreshing that I could drink over summer and this recipe for a Nelson Sauvin Summer Ale was recommended to me by another member of the AHB forums. What I liked about it was that it uses a simple malt bill, a single hop type and the use of whole leaf hops, which I have never used before.

I had to make one small change to my equipment in preparation for using flowers. This was to add a ball of stainless steel wool to the end of my pickup tube. I could just see trying to empty the kettle at the end of the boil only to have bits of hop flowers plugging up the pickup tube – no matter how well I whirlpool! In the end it worked a treat and below is a picture of the empty kettle showing the steel wool – beautiful!

The recipe is as follows:

• 4.5kgs Maris Otter Pale Malt
• 0.5kgs Torrefied Wheat Malt
• 15g Nelson Sauvin (Flowers) @ 80mins
• 20g Nelson Sauvin (Flowers) and 1 Whirlfloc Tablet @ 15mins
• 20g Nelson Sauvin (Flowers) @ Flameout
• 30g Nelson Sauvin (Flowers) – Dry Hop in Secondary
• Safale US – 05 – Starter of 1L

Mashed in @ 65°C - held for 60mins. Batch sparged and obtained a pre-boil volume of 36L (had to add about 4L of water to get it up there). SG pre-boil was 1.032…spot on!

90min boil which I kept vigorous for the entire time! But this time my calculations for boiloff were spot on with 23L going into the cube and about 2L to spare in the trub of the pot.

Update 13th December: Dumped the cube into a fermenter and pitched a starter of US-05. Checked the OG and it was only 1.042….a good 10 points under my target. I am thinking this was due to the few liters of water I put into the pot pre-boil to get the volume up. Doesn’t bother me though – I think the lower alcohol in this one will be benificial. From now on though, I am going to avoid watering down at any part of the process.

Update 1 April: Well, after going away for work and then changing jobs this beer was completely forgotten about. It decided to rack it to secondary to see if I could possibly salvage it as a Lambic or something….didn’t work. It was worth a try! Will definitely rebrew this recipe in the near future.

My personal thanks to Paddo for hosting the event and to DaveMKII for providing the carniverous delights.

Below is a video I made from snippets of footage over the day. If you are interested in the WSB (you don’t even have to be exclusively from Western Sydney by the way!) then head over to our google group here and give us a shout. It’s a lot of fun and a great way to get to know some like-minded brewers.

After having just finished my final run-off into the brew pot, I gave my wort a good stir – it was looking mighty fine! A nice clear, golden liquid of nearly 35L was merrily on its way to a boil. I decided this was a great time to take a sample for a pre-boil gravity reading. As the sample went into the test tube, I was really pleased with the clarity of the wort at this early stage. My batch sparging and recirculation technique is really coming along.

Then, suddenly….CRACK!!!

I spin around thinking some dude has just thrown a rock at my garage door, only to find the burner and boil pot on a 45° angle and slowly getting closer to the ground – the piece of fibre cement sheeting that I use as a heat sheild for the burner had cracked under the weight of the pot. You see, I had placed a piece of cement sheeting directly on the ground, then placed 4 bricks on top of it to form a square at their centre. Then I placed another smaller piece of cement sheeting on top of the bricks for added protection. This provides a great heat shield from the concrete. But…..in my infinite wisdom, when I placed the burner on top of the ‘fibre cement creation’ I didn’t think to check that the bricks were directly under the feet of the burner – they were actually in the gaps between the legs! (Go me)

Under the weight of 35L of wort in the pot, the unsupported parts of cement sheeting gave way. For what seemed like an eternity, I watched as my pot hit the ground at an angle (right onto the ball-valve no less), then slowly tipped completely over – sending the entire pot of near boiling wort all over the concrete on my garage and unit-block carpark.

I was completely stunned and speechless…..I couldn’t fathom what had just happened. I watched as the concrete was covered in liquid that crawled across the carpark to the drain. An entire brew….lost in 2 seconds. In the end, there was nothing I could do. My mind automatically starting thinking how lucky I was that it hadn’t broken the opposite direction and spewed forth into my garage….and over my bare feet. Or that is didn’t happen 10mins earlier when my wife had been in the exact direction that the pot had spilled.

I am certainly not one to cry over spilt milk (possibly mothers milk in this case! ); at least it was at this stage of the brew and not after I had used up all the hops I was going to put into it. I am more annoyed at the fact the ball valve on my pot has bent and the pot is now misshapen. I am going to have to get the hammer out and wack it back into place so there are no leaks…… but I can tell you one thing…..cleaning up after a brewday is always the least fun part of the process – but it is EVEN HARDER at the end of a brewday where you have produced nothing! haha I had my camera handy today so was able to take some pictures of the incident just after it had happened.

I am not giving up on this recipe though – I AM GOING TO PRODUCE A PROPER SNPA STYLE BEER IF IT IS THE LAST THING I DO!!!!!

The newly created River Wort.

Very lucky it went in the direction it did – would have turned my garage into a bacterial fast-food takeaway.

My poor pot got a pounding when it toppled over. An my luck is such that it had to have landed right on the ball valve. Going to need to seriously panel-beat the dings out of this one.

The culprit of this whole shenanigan. At least I now know how NOT to place the bricks underneath a peice of cement sheeting with 35L of hot wort in a pot on top of it!

The recipe for this attempt has remained largely the same. I have kept all four malts that I used in the previous recipe and the same hop types following the same schedule. I have just decreased the amounts of all to bring it into line with my new and expected efficiency. Recipe as follows:

• 3.2kgs JW Traditional Ale Malt
• 0.64kgs JW Light Munich Malt
• 0.34kgs JW Light Wheat Malt
• 0.15kgs JW Pale Crystal Malt
• 21g Pearle @ 90mins
• 30g Cascade and 1/2 Whirlfloc @ 15mins
• 20g Cascade @ Flameout
• 20g Cascade Dry hopped in secondary
• Proculture Sierra Ale Yeast – PRO 10 (Second Gen. – from previous brew)

Mash in @ 68°C, rest for 60min and batch sparge. Boil time is 90mins with the total volume in the fermenter to be 21L (hopefully! )

UPDATE: Due to the distaster that was the brewday with this beer (see above post) I am temporarily holding off on brewing this beer until after the WSB brewday and caseswap….but it will be brewed!

Many weeks of reading and researching about different techniques came to fruition last weekend with my first all-grain batch of beer being brewed. It was a lot of fun and went surprisingly well – but not without my fair share of newbie all-grain issues….mainly due to being overly cautious with Beersmith; read on to find out!

Firstly, lets start with the recipe….

For my first AG, I felt it important that I didn’t go with anything overly fancy but still tried to incorporate some things I have never used in brewing before. I chose a recipe based closely around the notable American brew “Sierra Nevada Pale Ale”.

• 4.25kg JW Traditional Ale Malt
• 0.85kg JW Munich Malt
• 0.45kg JW Wheat Malt
• 0.25kg JW Light Crystal Malt
• 21g Pearle @ 90mins
• 32g Cascade & 1/2 Tablet of Whirlfloc @ 15mins 
• 20g Cascade @0mins
• 20g Cascade – Dry Hop after primary fermentation
• Proculture PRO10 – Sierra Ale (1L Starter)

I mashed in @ 68°C – very happy that I hit my target temp first go (and after a couple of days previous where I was struggling to seal and calibrate my Mashmaster thermometer, I was glad to see it being registered correctly- and without any leaks! )

I batch sparged for this brew and pulled out the expected pre-boil volume of 29L. About halfway through the boil I started to get a little worried at the rate the boil was evaporating – it seemed to be loosing a lot of volume. I had anticipated a bit more evaporation loss than normal (and I entered this into beersmith to affect sparge volumes) but it seems I grossly underestimated my new burners ability to boil.

At the end of the boil, I ended up with a little under 16L in the cube for no-chilling – that equated to just over 13L(!!!!) evaporated over the course of 90mins!!!! Needless to say, my OG reading was a lot higher than anticipated; approx. 1.082….instead of the planned 1.052. To combat this, I added an extra 3L to the batch which brought the pre-pitch OG to 1.072 (23L in fermenter)…still much higher than anticipated.

At this stage, I realised that I had forgotten to take a SG reading pre-boil. If I had remembered to do this, I would have also found that my efficiency was WAY higher than I had expected from my first AG. After hearing that lots of people tend to undershoot their efficiency on the first AG, I set my ‘Brewhouse Efficiency’ in Beersmith to 60%….biiiig mistake. In the end, my actual efficiency was 83% – great news for my first brew! But bad news for my first brew hahah

Pitched a large starter of Proculture PRO-10 (Sierra Ale). It shouldn’t have a problem with the higher alchol content. Was off like a light in about 5 hours.

So….what have I learnt from my first AG experience:

1. Do a test boil with water to see what your evaporation rate is when you get new equipment
2. Don’t listen to what other people have problems with for their first AG – JUST GET IN AND DO IT!
3. Don’t fiddle with Beersmith settings that I am not confident about! hahah
4. Relax, Don’t Worry, Have a Homebrew !! (RDWHAHB)

Overall I had a blast with All-Grain Brewing and I am sure that this brew, whilst no longer a Sierra Nevada style clone, will turn out interesting and could even be a good beer in itself. Keeping the records of this one to make sure I can replicate it if needs be!

Next brew is going to be fairly soon after this one as I really want another crack at this particular recipe now that I have located the issues I had with the first one.

18 November
Racked this to secondary and dry-hopped the remaining cascade –  mmmmm smells great. Sneaked a small taste from the hydrometer sample; not too bad! Quite strong at this stage but the flavours are there. I stumbled upon a nickname for this recipe – it is now known as the SN(I)PA! I is for Imperial ahhahaha

Bit by bit, I have been collecting the required (and some not really required equipment to being brewing all-grain. I have found this the best way to get into this aspect of brewing as it didn’t feel like a huge chunk of funds were being taken from my back pocket in one-go, and I was able to fit out my brewery with some little bits and pieces that would be considered ‘not really necessary’ to brewing all-grain beer (things like stainless steel fittings).

Lets start with the first purchase I made…

The Mash Tun (Sorry – photos on the way)

My mash tun consists of a 55L esky that I purchased using frequent flyer points (a great way to spend them!). I fitted it with a ball-valve and created a DIY bulkhead using some threaded piping and home-made washers (from Silicon bakeware). I used compression fitting with a small piece of copper pipe on the inside of the tun to attached a 30cm length of SS braided hose with a hose-clamp. For the end of the braid, I just neatened up the wire with scissors and folded it back on itself, and secured it tightly with a cable tie A couple of weeks later, I decided to purchase and install a Mashmaster Mash Thermometer. I picked a spot on my esky and drilled a 1/2 inch hole to install the thermometer. Everything was going great until I realised on small, annoying little detail – I had installed the thermometer too high on the tun. Whilst it was a great looking spot for it (right between the handle, directly above the ball valve), a standard 1-batch mash would not reach that high up in the tun. So, I reinstalled it much lower down where it would definitely be fully submersed in the mash.!

Now I have the issue of patching a hole in the esky….that will be for a future post!

All in all, it probably cost be about $70, which is by no means the cheapest build that I have seen

Burner

In looking for a burner, I wanted something that was going to be able to boil 50L with no problem, and would be able to upgrade in the future if I ever wanted to go into larger batches. I also wanted something that wouldn’t wake the neighbors or feel like I was launching a surface-to-air missle.

After much investigation, I went for an Italian Spiral Burner which I purhased from BeerBelly.

This thing looks great – with the low pressure, adjustable regulator that I purchased with the burner, I should be able to boil volumes of up to 70L without breaking a sweat.

Pot

A lot of people have suggested that anyone looking to buy a pot to start out in AG should get a larger volume than they think they will need. That is, if you only want to brew single batches (36L pot) then you should go for a 50L pot or larger, just in case you want to brew double batches down the line.

Whilst I agree with this ‘spending  little more now will save you in the long run’ type thinking, I really can’t afford to buy a really large pot at this stage. I personally need to prove to myself that I can make really, REALLY good beer before I start investing a mint in my brewery.

Thus, I have purchased a 45L pot from Pat at  Abolute Home Brew. This pot comes with a SS bulkhead with SS ballvalve. 45L will give me the ability to do a good size, single batch. Also, the price of this pot is cheap enough that, further down the line if I want to upgrade, I won’t feel like I wasted a huge amount cash. I also purchased for this pot a SS pickup tube and SS hosetail barb from Beerbelly. The pickup tube is something that I felt I needed in order to stop so much trub from entering my fermenter. The hosetail just makes emptying the pot a little neater (and it looks good

So…now all I need is to stop writing and start brewing! Next on the to-do list…..putting together the recipe!

I went out and purchased a couple of 5L demijohns to be used as ‘mini-carboys’. I then got a grain bag and a really small 6 can esky to use as a mashtun. I now have the ability to produce a small quantity of all-grain beer for the use as a test batch of beer.

For my first test batch, I decided to try and use up the rest of a supply of Saaz that I had in the freezer, to get a good idea of the flavour profile of Saaz. My ingredient list consisted of the following:

• 1kg Joe White Pilsener Malt
• 10g Saaz @ 45mins
• 10g Saaz @ 15mins
• 10g Saaz @ 5mins
• 10g Saaz @ Flame-out
• Saflager W-34/70

Mashed at 65°C for 45mins. Boil volume of 5.5L. 60 minute boil.

Ended up with 4.5L in the fermenter……well, that has a story in itself….

Due to the largish amount of hops in such a small volume of wort, I had a large problem with an extremely excessive amount of trub getting into the demijohn. I attempted to strain alot of the hop material out as I poured but couldn’t strain any of the proteins so I ended up with a pillow of gunk in the bottom…..that and there was a very, VERY green hue to the whole wort….ahem.

Oh well. This is the idea anyway. A way to try different things without risking stuffing up a whole batch of beer. Will let it ferment for about a week then cold crash and bottle.

It was a whole lot of fun and I highly recommend it.

Update – 4 November
Bottled this into 330ml bottles and primed with dextrose. Man, what an experience this was! My suggestion is that you have a buddy help you with this part as trying to fill the bottles whislt holding the syphon hose off the bottom of the demijohn was not easy. Ended up with alot of the floor! Beer looks clear in the bottle though, will give it a week or so to carb up then see how it turned out.

Update – 8 November
Cracked open a 330ml bottle of this today to taste the experiment.

Opened with a decent hiss for only a week of priming. Pours a decent head…on top of a nice, pale green liquid! Smells fruity and hoppy. Flavour is quite balanced for the amount of hops that went in. Saaz flavour comes through quite strong but is very refreshing. The combination of yeast and higher fermentation temp has produced expected fruitiness but doesn’t overpower – would expect it to mellow with a few more weeks in the bottle. Overall, an interesting result for such a weird first test. Looking forward to trying this test out in the future with many more combinations of ingredients!

I recently picked up a copy of The Complete Guide to Beer and Brewing by Laurie Strachan with mixed ideas about what I would think of it. After reading it, I was pleasantly surprised with how useful a book like this will become for me in the future.

The start of the book consists of a small section that gives you an overview on the history of beer and an in-depth look at the background of each of the basic ingredients in beer – Malt, Hops, Water and Yeast – and what they each contribute to the makeup of any particular beer style.

The book continues with a very thorough look at all the different styles of beers and the history behind them. A nice little feature is that each beer style description is accompanied by the corresponding excerpt from the BJCP (Beer Judge Certification Program) Style Guide. This allows you to have simple and complete reference for tasting, brewing and general appreciation of a particular style. Neat for having on hand when tasting a new brew (or comparing your brew to a style). The author has also added some Australian commercial examples of certain styles in the existing BJCP guidelines – something which the American-written guidelines do not originally include.

With a small section on actual home-brewing at the end, this book is generally not the best brewing manual on the market, but it does give a good explanation of the various brewing terms and processes, and is broadly aimed at both the novice and intermediate-advanced brewer. However, it does include some great recipes in both the extract and all-grain methods to emulate certain styles that have been talked about earlier in the book, with all the calculations and weights in the metric system – a nice change from many other recipe books on the market.

All in all, I think this book is a great book for any serious beer lover to have in their library. It is an interesting read with some great information regarding the many beer styles around and can provide a useful resource for all serious home-brewers.

The only problem was that this was an all-grain recipe and I am planning on getting a few more brews under my belt before heading there. So, my task was to convert this recipe to an extract one using specialty grains. After looking around I found some information on the Beersmith blog here.

So, I came up with the following recipe: 

• 3kgs Liquid Malt Extract – Pale/Light
• 0.35kg – Pale Crystal Malt (Steeped)
• 5g Nelson Sauvin, 10g Cascade @ 45mins
• 1/2 Whirlfloc Tablet @ 15mins
• 10g Nelson Sauvin, 15g Cascade @ 10mins
• 15g Nelson Sauvin, 15g Cascade @ Flame-out
• 20g Cascade – Dry hopped in secondary
• Wyeast #1272 – All American Ale

 Steep Crystal malt in 2L water – 66°C for 20mins. Add 1 can of malt extract pre-boil and 2nd at flameout.

Boil volume is 15L. Final batch size will be 25L (usually 21 but I want to have a few leftovers for myself after I distibute for the case swap. No starter made on account of the Wyeast activator pack being used.

O.G. = 1.042      F.G = 1.010       A.B.V = 4.7%

Fermented for 10 days @ 18°C, in secondary for 16 days @ 18°C.

Am very keen to see how this one goes – 1st time dry hopping.

Update – 4 November:

Due to time constraints, I wasn’t able to bottle this one  for a while after adding to secondary. I fear that this long in the secondary with the dry-hops may have lost some of the really nice cascade aroma I was after. Bottled into 750ml bottles and primed with dextrose. Will leave to carb and condition in brew fridge @ 18°C for a couple of weeks. Got 30 bottles in the end so I still have some to try myself before I swap the rest.

Hey There!

Welcome to the Perfect Pitch Brewing Blog – a place for me to put all my brewing and beer related thoughts and discoveries, to share with anyone who wants to read them!

I plan to post the details of each brew I complete and related information that I have learnt from each brewing session. Recipes, pictures, tutorials etc all about this hobby that has me completely hooked…..

HOME BREWING!!!

Stay tuned for content soon!