chromosphere

On Saturday morning, I started off a brew for a batch of porter with the following grist based on Jamil Zs brown porter:

3.9kg Pale malt
500g Munich malt
500g Brown malt
500g Crystal malt
280g Chocolate malt

Mashed it at 67C for a few hours and then sparged it all down. However, at this point, one of the elements in my boiler decided to stop working leaving me with one element to heat 30L of liquid. Eventually got a (not very vigorous) boil and chucked in 60g of some old Bramling Cross hops I had in the freezer. After 45 minutes, that element also pegged out.

Putting the boiler on the hob to try to get it going again, I chucked in the remaining 35g of hops and Irish moss, and I managed to get the brew back up to 95C for another 20 minutes or so, but no boil. Anyhow cooled it and landed up with loads of wort (27L or so…) at 1051.

Of course, to top it all off, I found my immersion heater was also smashed, and so I had to cover the hole in the lid of the fermenter with a saucer. Needless to say, the SO4 has now gone potty and is spewing foam all over the place in the fermenting fridge – it’ll be a minor miracle if this isn’t infected…

Sod.

Still, it smells amazing (think chocolate factory!), and new kettles (+ spares!) are on order with Tesco awaiting some butchering to allow me to replace the elements prior to my next brew, when I am aiming to do a Hefeweizen with some WLP300 that I need to grow up in a starter beforehand.