{"id":24,"date":"2007-11-27T10:18:51","date_gmt":"2007-11-26T23:18:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rg-d.com\/BioLOG\/2007\/11\/27\/one-bourbon-one-scotch-one-blog-part-v\/"},"modified":"2007-11-27T10:33:57","modified_gmt":"2007-11-26T23:33:57","slug":"one-bourbon-one-scotch-one-blog-part-v","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/rg-d.com\/BioLOG\/2007\/11\/27\/one-bourbon-one-scotch-one-blog-part-v\/","title":{"rendered":"One bourbon, one scotch, one blog – Part V"},"content":{"rendered":"

Note to self: Preparing another batch of homebrew while you have friends round to taste previous batches is not one of your better plans.<\/p>\n

On Saturday I stuck the wheat back into the oven and turned the temperature up to about 50\u00b0C for a couple of hours with the fan on full. Then we went out and left it to cool. Final moisture content was around 5%, perhaps a little high but I didn’t want to push it any further.<\/p>\n

And then the fun began. I spent an hour milling the grain with a spice mill<\/p>\n

5 kg milled malt<\/p>\n

and then soaked it in warm water (52\u00b0C) for an hour or so \u2014 ‘mashing’. Next it was into various pans to bring the temperature up to 68 \u2013 70 \u00b0C for the mashing out (meant to be half an hour, but with the aforementioned friends around I think the best we can do is ‘indeterminate’):<\/p>\n

porridge<\/p>\n

Finally I added Tettnang hops<\/a> to the big pan and boiled for half an hour, before straining the whole lot into a fermenting barrel, stirring in some dextrose and making the volume up to 23 l with cold water. The mash volume was rather less than I was expecting; I think next time I should squeeze out what I can from the malted wheat and then sparge it with hot water for a second extraction. My starting specific gravity was only 1040 with the dextrose added, so a little low (i.e. the brew is too dilute).<\/p>\n

Sunday morning I was a little concerned to find that fermentation had started (small fizzy bubbles at the surface) but when I added the yeast it went completely mental (‘vigorous’) and today (Tuesday), fermentation is about finished, with SG = 1005. So by the time I’ve added priming sugar to the bottles, we’re looking at 4.5 \u2013\u00a05 % ABV, which isn’t too shabby.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Note to self: Preparing another batch of homebrew while you have friends round to taste previous batches is not one of your better plans. On Saturday I stuck the wheat back into the oven and turned the temperature up to about 50\u00b0C for a couple of hours with the fan on full. Then we went […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[94,25,19,24,26,17],"class_list":["post-24","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-beer","tag-beer","tag-hops","tag-malting","tag-mash","tag-sparge","tag-wheat"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/rg-d.com\/BioLOG\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/rg-d.com\/BioLOG\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/rg-d.com\/BioLOG\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rg-d.com\/BioLOG\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rg-d.com\/BioLOG\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=24"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/rg-d.com\/BioLOG\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/rg-d.com\/BioLOG\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=24"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rg-d.com\/BioLOG\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=24"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rg-d.com\/BioLOG\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=24"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}