Absolute Homebrew

The Jever inspired beer of June 17 has been sampled. The bitterness is good at about 42 IBU, but it is still very young and not quite as dry as I wanted. Could be just unintegrated grain sweetness from the flaked barley (14%) in a very young beer. We will see.

The demo beer from June 24 will be on tap at Faulconbridge by next weekend.

I don’t know “Mild Octoberfest” really means anything, but some sort of title is needed I suppose, and it does indicate something about the beer. It kind of follows on from last week’s demonstration beer which was also billed as a Mild Octoberfest.

The grain bill was
2.0 kg Joe White Pilsener
2.0 kg JW Light Munich
0.25 Weyermann Cara-Munich I

Cara-Munich is a German crystal malt, I is the palest at about 120 ebc.

Again mashed in 20 litres of water, strike temp was 70 deg. C to get a mash temp of 66 deg. Mashed for 50 minutes and then aded 8 litres of boilng water to mash out. This raised the temp to about 76 deg, left to rest for about 15 minutes. Recirculated about 3 litres and then ran off into the kettle.

Once a couple of litres was collected turned on the heat. Unlike last week with too short a boil, this week had a good 50 minute boil before any hops were added. It was a bit chaotic in the shop this week. After a very slow start it went haywire from about 11 onwards.

Hopping was:
45 minutes 46 grams 5.7% Hallertau for about 22 - 23 IBU
3 minutes 12 grams of same for about 0.5 IBU

After the end of the boil the wort stood much longer than I wanted, 45 minutes or more instead of the usual 20. It was a busy day.

So the final gravity was about 1046.

The yeast was recylced W/34-70. Last weeks demo beer was racked while waiting for the wort to settle after whirlpooling, and the yeast recovered. Half was bottled for later use, the other half used with this beer.