First extract brew disaster (or may be not) ?

[Waffty]

Hi,

Kicked off my first Extract brew yesterday, using a customised 'Dry Kit' from my local homebrew shop (Harris's in Gornal).

The final 'tweaked' kit was made up of the following :-

304g Crystal/Chocolate Malt (2g of Chocolate, rest Crystal)
2.25 Kg Light Dry Extract
40g of Northern Brewer hops
15g of fuggles (aroma)
1/2 Tsp of Irish Moss
20 Litres of Water.
Safe04
Yeast Vit

I put all the ingredients into Beersmith & based on a 10Litre boil, got pretty much what I was after for my Session/Special bitter target.

And kicked off the following process
1 ) Heating 5 Litres of water upto 77C & steeped my grain for 30 mins

2 ) Added another 5 Litres of water
3 ) Then added 500g of Light DME
4 ) Mixed in DME & attempted to bring to the boil

** After steaming up the kitchen for SEVERAL minutes, I realised that my combination of stock pot & gas hob, was never going to boil the 10 Litres, asked of it. So sensing disaster, I transferred 3 Litres of liquid from one stock pot to another.

5 ) Managed to get both the 7 Litre & 3 Litre stock pots to boil.
6 ) Added 2x muslin bags of Northern brewer (20g each, making 40g total) did a rolling boil for 30 minutes
7 ) Added muslin bag of Fuggles hops (15g) & steeped (heat removed) for 30 minutes.
8 ) Added 1/2 teaspoon of Irish moss to 7 Litre stock pot with 10minutes remaining.

9 ) Added 8 litres of cold water to my fermenter & mixed in remaining 1.75Kg of DME + 1/2 teaspoon of yeast Vit.
10 ) Removed Hops from both 7L & 3L pots & cooled.

11 ) Filtered both 7L & 3L stock pot contents into fermenter.
12 ) Topped up to 20L mark & gave a dam good stir.

13 ) Check temp & it was bang on the money at 25C, so pitched yeast & crossed fingers.

14 ) This morning, it was bubbling away at a steady pace.

Fearing the worst (with respect to dropping the boil volume), I put my actuals into Beersmith, as suspected, the IBU had dropped from 19 to 13.

So is this something to worry about, as I assume that Beersmith uses all the Extact as part of it's hop utilisation calculation ? That is, if I use Beersmith to calculate bitterness, based on my 'actuals' of 700g of Extact/grain, 40g of Northern at 30 min boil + 7 litres of water, I get a bitteness value of 22 ?

If it is under bittered, can I do a mini boil (based on 1L to 2L), cool & simply at this to my fermenting beer ?

Many thanks in advance & moving forward, I will need to get myself an electric boiler or use the same setup with a 7 Litre (& may be use my second 3 Litre stock pot for Steeping / Additional boiling?) ?

Darren.


**** Update ***

Just found a setting in BeerSmith for late addition of DME, so ran the process again, using my actual values & it gave me a much healthier IBU rating. If you interested & have Beersmith, there's a tick box for Late Extract for boiling. So the bittering process is done for the actual extract, in the pot, at the time of the boil, if that makes sense.

***** ------ *****

[Invalid Stout]

It ought to be possible to boil 10 l on a domestic cooker. I do on my weedy electric hob, but it does take a long time -- 30 to 40 minutes to reach a boil. More than several minutes.

[Waffty]

It ought to be possible to boil 10 l on a domestic cooker. I do on my weedy electric hob, but it does take a long time -- 30 to 40 minutes to reach a boil. More than several minutes.

I'd have thought so too, hence why I tried it I attempted to get it boil for well over 40 minutes, if anything well over an hour.

The only thing I can put it down too, is that my pan is a heavy duty, circa 3mm thick aluminium & around 40cm diameter (made by Vogue), so I'm guessing the pan is 'loosing' some of the heat, which would otherwise absorbed by the liquid. As it literally 'stuck' at 85 degress for at least 15 minutes. Yet, when I removed 3L of liquid, it rose steadily from 85 degrees, all the way up too boiling point. At one stage, I tried straggling the pot over two burners & even then, the temp didn't rise significantly.

So moving forward, I think I'll either stick to a 7 litre boil length, or look into fitting an electric element, as in theory, the pan will happily take a 12 litre boil length.

After messing around with Beersmith, it looks like a 7 litre boil length at 30 mins, in a 1020 gravity wort, with 7% AA hops, should give me an IBU in the mid 30's which should be just right for my brew?

Approx IBU30 (mins) = 10.5 (1.5oz x 7%AA) * 0.212 (efficiency 1020 gravity @ 30mins) x 75 / 5 = Approx 33 IBUs

& that's being very conserative on the hop rating & boil gravity.

So fingers crossed, it should be ok & if it isn't, I'll just have to learn by my mistakes