Home brewing antics can now be found at my other blog; http://gettinggrist.blogspot.com/

Thursday 23 June 2011

Dirty Habit - Brewday

I chose Wednesday as the day to brew this week and ended up with ten gallons of lovely rich copper coloured wort. I was aiming for a starting gravity of 1047, but came in just under at 1046 and the thinking behind the recipe was outlined in this post.

It was a trouble-free brewday but I didn't take any photos, so we'll have to make do with a sample of the wort in the trial jar.

I'm a little bit worried about the yeast, mind, as I was very lazy and didn't make up a proper starter. I had previously split a vial of WLP051 and stored the yeast in the fridge. I simply brought it up to room temperature before pitching.

I didn't get to pitch until about 20.00hrs last night, so I won't worry too much until 24hrs has passed...

Having been really pleased with my last few brews, I'm hoping this will be another good'un. Time will tell.

Oh, and as for the enormous electricity bill we had, it's not the new shiny brewery.  The new electricity monitor is in place and I monitored it with interest.

Two of my vessels in the brewery have heating elements and, when both were switched on, the monitor was estimating a total usage of £25 per day (not just brewery, but whole house usage). That may not sound a lot, but the quarterly bill on that basis would come in at over two grand.

However, the elements are rarely on together and in total, four hours would seem a good estimate for the entire brew. An hour maybe to heat the water for the mash, maybe another hour for the sparge, and hour for the boil and an extra hour to include the cleaning of the unit afterwards. If the monitor is accurate, at £25 per day, the total cost for four hours would be just over £4.00. And - thats based on 2 elements and includes the remainder of the house usage at the same time. So, the upshot is, it doesn't cost much to make a batch of beer. I'm off the hook!

3 comments:

  1. See? I told you it wasn't the brewery!

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  2. Aye, right you were. And the good news is that the yeast has now taken off, so I got away with it :)

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  3. I just keep my yeast in the cold store and let it warm to room temp before pitching. Not sure what state your yeast comes in, but it's quite hardy stuff :0)

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