Sunday, March 25, 2012
Brewing Day!
Today we are brewing a Brewmaker Mild from their Essential
Brew Kits collection. We hope to
have this ready for casking in conjunction with the cask bitter we did last
weekend for another cask party.
We smacked the Wyeast packet at 10:15 AM. We are using 1028 London Ale for this
brew and it was manufactured on 12/6/11.
I checked the yeast at around 4 PM and it hadn’t swelled up
quite as well as the others, so I gave the packet a gentle shake every 20-30
minutes and by the time we were ready for pitching, it had swelled up
beautifully.
The kit is based on metric measurements, so we will be
making 23 litres of beer. That is
roughly equivalent to just slightly over 6 US gallons. As such, we will be casking just under
5 US gallons of this brew and bottling the rest.
We have sanitized all of the tools we will need, put the extract
and the additional light and dark extract into warm water to make them flow a
bit better, and have started boiling 5 ½ gallons of purified water.
I measured out 500 grams each of the Brewcraft Light Malt
Extract and the Dark Malt Extract.
Once the water was brought to a boil, we turned off the gas, added the
Brewmaker Mild Malt Extract, 500 grams of Light Malt Extract, and 500 grams of
Dark Malt Extract, stirring the whole time.
We added a capful of the water treatment and yeast nutrient
we have from The Beverage People and about 4 ounces of Malto-Dextrin to add a
bit more body to the beer.
This was all completed at about 6 PM.
We then turned the gas back on to bring the wort back up to
a boil. We are experimenting with
actually leaving the lid on but widely cracked. However, our first attempt led to a boil over so we brought
the wort up to a boil without the lid and then put the lid on and adjusted the
flame, watching the wort the whole time so we could get the flame down to an
appropriate size to have a good boil while the lid is on. We had one more boil over before we got
it right. We then let it boil for
30 minutes.
We then used the wort chiller to bring the wort down to
below 85 degrees F. We then
emptied the boiler into the fermenter, making sure to aerate the wort. At this point, I poured a bit of the
beer into a cylinder and used this to check the original gravity.
OG: 1.032
We then pitched the yeast at about 7:45 pm, secured the lid,
put vodka in the airlock and secured it in the lid, and moved it to where it
will ferment for the next 6 to 8 days.
We then put on a heating jacket to keep it at 67 to 68 degrees F for the
fermentation.
Tuesday, April 3, 2012
Directions said 4 to 8 days fermentation time and the Final
Gravity should be at 1.006 or less.
9 days into fermentation, the gravity is 1.016
Sunday, June 10, 2012
Unfortunately, I did not do a very good job with this brew
in terms of noting down what happened after this date. We did end up casking and bottling this beer on April 5, 2012. I believe the final gravity did not change much which is why we decided to forward with it.
While we had no explosion troubles with the bottles, the beer we casked did appear to be a bit lively. On April 12, Tony noticed that the shive had come up a bit from its proper lodging (as you can see in the picture). We were a bit concerned that this would spoil the beer. He used the mallet to bang the shive back into place. Luckily, this had no ill impact on the beer as it turned out well. 
The bottles of Mild turned out rather
nice, as did the cask of the Mild.
The Mild went over very well at the cask party we had on April 29,
although I think the William’s Brewing English Bitter we did was a bit more
popular -- not surprising given the Pacific Northwest's love of hops! 
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