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Customized brews (outside of the brewprints.....)


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On 08/11/2021 at 11:30 PM, Dustin Frothman said:

I got this one done tonight. Did the mini infusion on the gas stove in a 10 litre stockpot by very slowly bringing the mixture to a boil stirring occasionally. A good quality digital food grade thermometer made this relatively simple and accurate. 

I sanitised some aluminium foil and covered the pot with it and then added the lid during the hops infusion. After 30 minutes I chilled the pot in the laundry sink filled with ice cubes and cold water.

It wasn't difficult getting only 4 litres of wort down from 85 to 21C relatively quickly.

Then I strained it into the droid and topped up with 6 litres of water. Yeast and remainder of ingredients in.

Other than being extra careful with sanitation, the only tricky thing with this brew will be remembering to manually adjust the fermentation schedule as per the instructions above.

Fingers crossed it turns out ok.

So the recipe called for a 4 day dry hop at EOF but I like using the Dry Hop function of the Brewart program so I did this and dry hopped for 48 hours, then cold crashed for 48 hours automatically as per the program. The brew warmed up overnight to kegging temperature at 18 C and I'll leave it there another 48 hours and then cold crash again for another day or so before kegging.

I've employed the very scientific method of smelling the brew through the vent port and it's fantastic. The extra cold crash is really only to ensure that I can be certain I'll filter out all the floaties - now that I'm using Corny kegs a stuck poppet due to an errant bit of hop material would be a bit of a problem.

As usual I should end up with a taster bottle so hopefully this one will be ready for Christmas and some warmer weather because it smells like a sunny day beer.

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14 hours ago, Dustin Frothman said:

I've employed the very scientific method of smelling the brew through the vent port and it's fantastic. The extra cold crash is really only to ensure that I can be certain I'll filter out all the floaties - now that I'm using Corny kegs a stuck poppet due to an errant bit of hop material would be a bit of a problem.

Haha, love that idea, didn't think of it, using the vent port and just giving it a good smell.

In terms of removing floaties, as a NEIPA should be a very cloudy beer, aren't floaties what you want? Or are you in this case specifically referring to bits of broken down hop material?

As I understand it after watching more YouTube videos than I can count and reading as many articles as I can find on the topic, NEIPAs get their cloudy appearance from a combination of two things, primarily proteins from use of high protein adjuncts, primarily in the grain bill of wheat or oats (which are most commonly used when making Hazy IPAs and NEIPAs) and polyphenols from the hops. There is one last thing that plays a minor part in the haziness which is the type of yeast used (such as the one you have used for this brew).

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16 minutes ago, Wazza_wantsbeer said:

Or are you in this case specifically referring to bits of broken down hop material?

Yeah, broken down hops as they could clog up the liquid up the liquid out poppet on the keg.

I doubt this is going to be a cloudy beer in the NEIPA sense but we’ll see. I reckon we’d probably need to add some oats to the stovetop steep.

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2 minutes ago, Wazza_wantsbeer said:

Exactly. From my lab days, you always waft towards your nose and never sniff directly from the beaker or test-tube as you never know what is in there and how it might hurt you and your nose  🤧

Yep that’s why I said that … I still recall how much we enjoyed the concept of wafting in high school chemistry class. 😆

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1 hour ago, Wazza_wantsbeer said:

As I understand it after watching more YouTube videos than I can count and reading as many articles as I can find on the topic, NEIPAs get their cloudy appearance from a combination of two things, primarily proteins from use of high protein adjuncts, primarily in the grain bill of wheat or oats (which are most commonly used when making Hazy IPAs and NEIPAs) and polyphenols from the hops. There is one last thing that plays a minor part in the haziness which is the type of yeast used (such as the one you have used for this brew).

I mentioned elsewhere that I purchased a Coopers Pale Ale can and other ingredients when they were on special here recently.

The plan is to make a split batch across two Droids - one a hoppy pale ale and the other a NEIPA using oats and some malt in a stovetop mini brew in a bag mash. I’ll use the Lallemand NEIPA yeast again.

You’re likely to have seen it but here’s the link. I’m a big fan of Gavin and his really down to earth approach to brewing:

 

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On 23/11/2021 at 5:54 PM, Dustin Frothman said:

As usual I should end up with a taster bottle so hopefully this one will be ready for Christmas and some warmer weather because it smells like a sunny day beer.

NEIPA.thumb.jpg.9ca3af340a1476267de068695a2f0d66.jpg

I got the NEIPA kegged today with the sampler bottle as expected.

It smelled like orange juice so that's a pretty good start.

I'll try the bottle after 14 days and consider tapping the keg shortly thereafter depending on how the taster goes.

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1 hour ago, Captain 3 Droids said:

How’s your kegging/kegerator setup going?

Kegging itself is going really well but I'll be careful here not to make out that it's not without its traps. As mentioned elsewhere I'll try to give a balanced appraisal of the two kegging methods I've used so far in the other thread.

The kegerator itself is ready to go and I reckon I'll be likely to pull the first beer through it this weekend.

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53 minutes ago, Dustin Frothman said:

Kegging itself is going really well but I'll be careful here not to make out that it's not without its traps. As mentioned elsewhere I'll try to give a balanced appraisal of the two kegging methods I've used so far in the other thread.

The kegerator itself is ready to go and I reckon I'll be likely to pull the first beer through it this weekend.

I've just sold my 4 tap series X kegerator and the six 19L kegs, because I want to start again with 10L kegs and a normal size fridge this time. I've built an 8 tap keezer in 2019 and it was a big hit with my mates but I brewed a lot of beer and subsequently it ended up inside my body. My wife is laughing, I'm constantly downsizing, but I'm definitely stopping at 3 taps. I'm interested in hearing about your experiences. 😉

 

Cheers

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4 minutes ago, Hambone said:

I've just sold my 4 tap series X kegerator and the six 19L kegs, because I want to start again with 10L kegs and a normal size fridge this time.

Yeah I bought a Series X but went with 3 taps only. I have 10 of the 9.5L Corny kegs as this matches my Brewart PET kegs capacity. I think that's enough for me as one of the things I really like about the Brewart PET kegs is how compact they are. The 9.5L Corny is a nice compromise.

I really just wanted more than 1 beer available on tap at a time. In a normal session I'll drink 3 pints. Changing the keg in the Brewflo 3 times in a session is a bit cumbersome and pre chilling 3 kegs in the main house fridge not really an option space wise.

I guess I could've purchased 2 more Brewflos but I haven't had much luck with that system this year and just felt ready to move on from it. My initial requirement for the Brewflo was due to a planned move to a country where you can't purchase CO2 easily and it seemed like a neat solution. When it works it is great, but unfortunately there are a few issues.

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1 minute ago, Hambone said:

yeah sorry I have the 9.5L corny kegs too. 5 of em I'm starting with.

 

 

Nice. Wasn't sure if you had those or the 10L mini keg style. I can certainly see the advantages of the Corny style keg. So easy to fill and clean. I'm doing closed transfers but that's just by choice.

Thanks to some great advice and hand holding from @Captain 3 Droids I'm basically getting 10L of beer into them. I always fill 1 PET taster bottle first and it's working out ok.

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12 minutes ago, Dustin Frothman said:

Nice. Wasn't sure if you had those or the 10L mini keg style. I can certainly see the advantages of the Corny style keg. So easy to fill and clean. I'm doing closed transfers but that's just by choice.

Thanks to some great advice and hand holding from @Captain 3 Droids I'm basically getting 10L of beer into them. I always fill 1 PET taster bottle first and it's working out ok.

Yeah that's my hope too. I bought the closed transfer connector from IKegger. It's inbound too. It's @Captain 3 Droids fault that I got this. He posted on the Craft Brewing forum about it. It took me a couple of years. 😁

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25 minutes ago, Hambone said:

Yeah that's my hope too. I bought the closed transfer connector from IKegger. It's inbound too. It's @Captain 3 Droids fault that I got this. He posted on the Craft Brewing forum about it. It took me a couple of years. 😁

That's great! It's actually a pity that the two forums aren't merged.

I reckon a few Coopers DIY brewers would soon be pretty keen on a BeerDroid if they saw the results they could achieve.

The iKegger connector works really well. You could easily make one yourself but I can't work out what the stainless joiner at the Dry Hop filter end is. I wouldn't mind finding a spare. 

As the beer line they provide is only 4mm internal diameter I do find that you need to pull on the pressure release valve fairly often to keep the beer flowing but as you're only transferring 10 litres at a time it's not a big deal. If you had some 5mm line you could always just swap it out.

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On 10/9/21 at 6:24 AM, Captain 3 Droids said:

Bless Father’s Day, received a Mangrove Jack’s Irish Red pouch with 1.2kg of liquid light malt. Included yeast M15 and Golding hops. I mixed up the ingredients and split into 2 Droids that were kegged and idle within a day of each other. Split the yeast and will dry hop on day 4 as fermentation eases.

This was a bloody ripper. I did with fuggles and goldings.  Was remarkable and VERY different from every other beer I’ve done.  
 

how did yours come out?

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On 22/10/21 at 1:11 PM, Captain 3 Droids said:

At nearly 7 weeks not a bad drop but I really don’t like the roasted after taste of the malt, got rid of this by 3/4 Irish red and 1/4 English Pub Draught. However will leave a few more weeks to see how it matures, which it should do (I think)

It did improve and the roasting mellowed, a nice drop but will not brew again. To be honest not a fan of Mangrove Jacks ingredients for some of their brews.

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Brew No. 4

Got the half All Inn Brewing NEIPA FWK into the Droid this evening.

7.5l of the 15l FWK was carefully measured into a sanitised bucket where I had first pre-dissolved 150 g of Dextrose in 1 litre water.

Poured the 8.5l into the Droid and topped up with 1.5l of the same PureAU water I've been using for all my brews thus far.

Pitched half the packet (5.5 grams of 11 grams net) of Lellemand "LALBREW NEW ENGLAND™ – AMERICAN EAST COAST ALE YEAST"

Sanitised and closed the yeast packet up tight, put in a zip lock freezer bag and straight into the freezer. This sounded right based on what I read doing a quick Google search.

Then got as much air out of the bag containing the remaining FW and then well sanitised the spout area,  again, and put that into the freezer.

Fingers crossed the remaining 7.5l of FWK is okay and the same with the half packet of yeast. Thoughts?

In terms of my hop plan for this NEIPA, the recommended hops as per the box are 50 grams each of Azacca, El Dorado and Sabro. That's obviously for a 20 litre ferment using the whole FWK and 5l of water.

I purchased all 3 hops in preparation for this brew and I'm thinking 30-35g of each at the dry hopping stage to hit around the 100g of hops mark. I won't try to Double Dry Hop this one and will just stick with the recommended dry hop at the end of or near to the end of fermentation when the Droid tells me to.

Interestingly, the FWK has written on the box that it has a starting gravity of 1.070.

I measured after the gravity after pouring all into the Droid but before pitching the yeast and got a Starting Gravity of 1.060.

Does that sound right? 10 points lost by diluting with 25% water?

For those experianced brewers, what do you think this will end up with in terms of % ABV before secondary fermentation?

Apparently if brewed unadulterated, just the wort and no added water, the expected ABV is 7.8%

I'm hoping to be somewhere around the 7% or so. Is this achievable given my SG is 1.060 rather than the 1.070?

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@Dustin FrothmanI want to ask, what was your experience with the Lalbrew New England yeast in the  Droid?

The 12 hour propagation has ended according to the Droid but looking thru the window, I see little to no activity.

Checking on the Lallemand website, "Lag phase can be longer when compared with other strains, ranging from 24-36 hours"

Wondering if your experience was similar when doing your NEIPA?

If not, maybe I've done something wrong?

Yet again, this is a good reason to have a couple of modes for the Droid, the standard mode for those who just want to click and forget and an advanced mode for those of us who fancy ourselves as something of a Dr. Frankenstein and like to experiment.

By the way, what were your brew settings for this one? I recall you changed the temps from day 1 to day 3?

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11 hours ago, Wazza_wantsbeer said:

Fingers crossed the remaining 7.5l of FWK is okay and the same with the half packet of yeast. Thoughts?

So you have frozen the remaining 7.5l of FW? It’s common to split into small quantities for using later as yeast starters (needs to be boiled to kill any bacteria) but not aware of freezing for later brew. (I’ll look into that further). @BrewArt TeamYour thoughts please.

Next time I’d do this, (if you can’t get all the air out of the bag) from Woolworths you should get 2 x 5l containers of either demineralised water (great for sanitisers) or the ultra pure water. Add 2.5l to the remaking 7.5l of FW and fill the the 2 sanitised 5l containers. 5l nearly fills to the top so easy to squeeze out the air. Then store in the fridge until required.

11 hours ago, Wazza_wantsbeer said:

I measured after the gravity after pouring all into the Droid but before pitching the yeast and got a Starting Gravity of 1.060.

Does that sound right? 10 points lost by diluting with 25% water

Should be about right assuming the starting gravity was for the 15l of wort and not calculated for the intended 20l.

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