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Monday 15 January 2018

It's been a while....

Wow. Looking at the dates it has been almost 4 years since I last put down a brew! Seems crazy that when we were renting a little house I somehow had space to brew but having bought a house, it seems hard to find enough space to unpack all the brewing gear...

But I have unpacked it all - truth be told it was because we bought a new fridge, it meant I could repurpose the old one to become a fermentation fridge. No longer will I need to babysit the fermented and put icepacks around it when it gets too hot.

Also my new neighbors are into brewing and have brought over a couple of beers that they have made and I feel guilty just consuming without reciprocating.

I have also been reading about no chill hot cube brewing. One of the things that never felt right about moving to all grain brewing was the chilling process using immersion/counter flow/heat exchanger and wasting a huge amount of water. This method lets you leave the wort to come down to yeast pitching temperature naturally over a few days, then you continue as normal. Am looking forward to giving that a go.

But didn't want to get ahead of myself and decided to start with something easy - just a extract kit brew (with a bit of dry hopping). Need to remember what I am supposed to be doing before venturing out and trying something like an all grain BIAB.

Picked up a limited edition Grapefruit IPA and a packet of Pure Malt that was onsale at an online store as being summer, Grapefruit IPA sounded pretty good.

The only problem on 'brew day' (more like assembly day) was that in the past I have always discarded the yeast supplied and bought a new one. I also have always rehydrated the yeast before pitching. In this case I didn't do either...

Now 24 hr later when I checked on the beer in the new fermentation fridge it is doing absolutely nothing. No happy bubbling of the fermentation lock. No foaming head. Nothing.

Will give it another half a day but will also pickup another packet of yeast in the advent that the fermentation does not go anywhere... hopefully it is not just growing bacteria...