All-grain Brewing Demonstration

[mysterio]

Hello folks

Myself and Mr 196osh will be giving an all-grain brewing demonstration on April 7th, in Glasgow, as part of Eric Steen's Glasgow Beer and Pub Project, which in turn is part of the Glasgow International Festival of Visual Art.

Thanks to Eric for giving us the chance to put the word out about homebrewing and good beer (and bankrolling this!).

We will be brewing an English bitter hopped with Kent Goldings, fermented with Fullers yeast, and served through a beer engine - delicious!

The best part is you will be drinking the beer on the 30th, for free as I understand it. I would like to see anyone with the mildest interest in beer to the all-grain enthusiast there. I will be pretty much sitting back and supping beer while you brew the beer on my system.

Rob @ Self Store Depot has kindly agreed to supply the malt and hops for this event free of charge. Show your appreciation by taking a look at his products here

I have ordered from Rob before and the hops were with me within 24 hours at a great price and superbly vacuum packed.

More details:

http://hoptopic.wordpress.com/2010/03/0 ... nstration/

http://glasgowbeerandpubproject.blogspot.com/

rob at selfstoredepot dot co dot uk

[ericmsteen]

There's a chance there will be a very small entry fee which will allow you to drink this English bitter along with lots of other great homebrewed beers on April 30th. The gallery is still working on the legalities of all that. I'm really looking forward to this all-grain demo, it should be great.

[oblivious]

Sounds fantastic, looks like its going to be a great day

[mysterio]

Will you be getting them to lug a 50L fermenter full of beer up the cellar steps ?

It will be divided between two 5 gallon better bottles

[retourrbx]

I was thinking of doing the same sort of thing down here in Tavistock but there doesn't seem to be many brewers about, not that I've looked around much

[Andy]

Who's sorting out all the HMRC gubbins ?

[mysterio]

Eric is taking care of all that, it's all kosher and above board!

Honestly Andy, the faintest sniff of people having fun and you're all over us with HMRC

Seriously though, I'm sure Eric will chime in about this, if there's any ambiguity about the law then no money will change hands for the beer.

[ericmsteen]

Yep, basically. The gallery is still working on getting a permit for money exchange, so we'll see what happens.

[booldawg]

Hope it all goes well Mys, have been reading about on your blog!

[mysterio]

Just a quick bump for this in case anyone local hasn't seen it.

Brew day is this Wednesday!

Looks like the beer will be 100% free, as far as I can tell.

[ericmsteen]

yes, the beer on the 30th will be free to visitors.
the homebrewing event this wednesday is also free.
thanks mysterio.

[mysterio]

Well, the beer is made! We ended up getting very good efficiency and overshooting our OG by 10 points. So we've got a 1.055 ESB. It's a split batch so I went in with WLP002 and the other half some US-05.

I think it's fair to say there were a few hiccups, one of the elements packed in before the wort came to the boil so we had to pump 5 gallons into the HLT and boil half in there. That was fine, but then we dumped the Immersion chiller into the HLT to sanitise (by this time we'd had a bunch of beers), and at the end of the boil pumped the wort through to the HLT to chill it (can you see what's coming.....)

No hop strainer in the HLT of course and by that time there were too many hops to pump it back into the kettle

So we just went ahead and chilled it, then Owen and I lifted the 10 gallons of wort while Robbie tipped it back into the kettle so we could pump it into the fermenters.

Oh yeah and we forgot the whirlfloc

Anyway, it should be fine. Homebrewers are a resourceful bunch so we managed to save it. Thanks to all who came. Not many folks had come across Jims Beer Kit which I was surprised by so I expect there will be a few new sign ups off the back of this. Nobody had heard of Rob's homebrew supplies either so he'll hopefully get a few customers out of this. We used 180g of Goldings he donated and threw in his 80g of Williamette too. We used some Nelson Sauvin and Pacific Gem for bittering.

We used these 'better bottle' fermenters which were a godsend, by the way. Easy to lift in and out of the car, and sealable.

[DarloDave]

Sounds like despite the few hiccups it was a success!

[vacant]

Well done. Must be a bit stressful to be watched for so long. Probably be far easier next time. Will there be a next time?

[borischarlton]

I am really glad it all worked out well, it wouldn't be a brew if there were no little niggles!! So are there going to be some all grain converts??

Cheers

Rob