chromosphere

No posts in ages, too much stuff to talk about it the last month and no time to do it! Here’s a brief run-down of our last few months which have been pretty hectic:

• Our Wedding!
• And Honeymoon! (photos when I finally manage to sort them…)
• A Boneshaker win for me!
• Village Ball
• Loads of friends’ birthdays and family visits
• A visit to the Lovibonds Brewery in Henley-on-Thames (thanks Jeff – great day!)
• Veggie patch digging/harvesting/sowing, and loss of all tomatoes to blight
• Chutney/Xmas cake making
• Beer: a Fuggles-based bitter, a wild hop honey ale, best and ordinary bitters for the Sutton Festival. And a new mash tun and boiler to come soon (with luck).

Phew!

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I just had to rebuild a RAID 1 array on my PC after having a Barracuda go potty on me. Mine is a Promise PDC20376 on an old MSI KT4 Ultra – hope you have a better controller), and some advice:

1. The BIOS utility (2.0.0) didn’t give you a progress bar for the rebuild option as I’d expect and as the manual states.
2. It’s not obvious that the array is rebuilding at all…
3. …unless you download and install the Promise Array Management software where you can see the status and progress when booted with the degraded array
4. When it rebuilds a 750GB array, it takes literally hours (about 12 in total, though I lost count…)…

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Oops – bit of a time since I last posted! Things to report:

Brewed a dunkelweizen – Jamil Z’s recipe which came out at OG1059, FG1010. Just conditioning now…

Tonight brewed a ordinary bitter – 87% Pale, 7% Crystal, 3% Flaked barley and Torrified Wheat. Also, 200g of dark brown sugar. Fuggles 4.4% 60g, 75min; 22g 15min. Eventually got 22L @ 1038.

Plus, Twitter & Blistered lasted a weekend between 8 of us on a narrowboat – good beer indeed (though not quite like the Harviestoun beer though – hey ho, never mind). If anyone happens to find my Sat night/Sun morning, please can they let me have it back as I seemed to lose it at the time…

Wednesday night brew! Here we go – BBQ time is coming – the hefeweizen will be at its prime, and the pale ale hopefully ready by then:

4.25kg Maris Otter
200g Caramalt
200g Flaked Barley
40g Flaked Maize (chucked in to use it up!)

Mash 90min at 66C or so.

Challenger 7.1%, 90min 22g
Hallertauer Hersbrucker 2.1%, 90min 40g
Hallertauer Hersbrucker 2.1%, 15min 20g
Styrian Goldings 3.9%, 15min 35g
Styrian Goldings 0min 40g

Yeast US-05

Went fairly smoothly – though lost a pile to the hops – got 21-22L at 1045 or so. I wonder if US05 is going to do it’s usual massive attenuation here….

Tonight I am running a whisky tasting at my cricket club.

Looking forward to 5 large measures each of some unfiltered single cask – even the one that I have no idea what the tasting notes were… (OK – it’s an Ardmore – a speyside – and it’s 14 years old. I know nothing more that…)

Last Friday, I managed to get a batch of Bavarian style Weizen on the go. Since I won’t filter it, or let it settle out, it’ll most likely be a hefeweizen (hefe = yeast) as opposed to a kristallweizen (or “Champagne Weizen” as a mate of mine also told me they are called) which are, ahem, clear…

The recipe is fairly simple – maybe slightly out of style with the Munich malt and using normal pale rather than pilsner malt, but I’m not doing a decoction mash so maybe it’ll help it all out with a bit more of that malty flavour.

2.5kg Wheat Malt
1.9kg Maris Otter
500g Munich Malt

Mash at 67C – use 34L of Asda bottled water with 1.5 tsp CaCl2. Target OG ~1050.

Hops:
45g Hallertau Hersbrucker (2.1%) bittering hop
20g Hallertau Hersbrucker (2.1%) last 15min

Yeast – WLP300; pitch at 13C and allow to rise to 17C.

Efficiency was a bit on the low side (20L at 1049) – it’s been going a few days now, and this yeast is going potty – it filled the gallon and a half of headspace in about 24 hours, and hasn’t quite died down yet. Eventually, I’ll try and reuse the slurry for making a dunkelweizen – this will have wheat and Munich or Vienna and a bit of chocolate and much the same for hops. I may even do a brief decoction, but that seems like a technique that’s prone to cock-ups…

Meanwhile, the last porter (which did get cocked up!) is smelling amazing and slowly creeping down in gravity – it’s currently 1019 (which makes for 63% attenuation – a bit lower than I’d expect, but then I did have to rack it into another fermenter to make way for the hefe – perhaps that was a bit early to do it (though the krausen had pretty much disappeared by that point. Maybe I’ll repitch and see if it’ll come down further or not).