One Helles of a brew for the brotherhood

My brother is joining me for Christmas and so my lovely wife suggested I brew up a small batch for his arrival. A brilliant idea! So I popped out the very handy Brewdog recipe book and decided (once again) to do a style I'm completely unfamiliar with complete with unfamiliar grains, yeast and hops!

Pop round in a couple of weeks Jeeza, they should be good to go then.

In an echo of the great Jeremy Clarkson "What could possibly go wrong here?"

In the end I settled for a clean looking and basic but hopefully smooth Munich Helles. Does my brother actually like this style? Buggered if I know. But hey'll it'll be a first for both of us.

A BREW DAY DAWNING



For the occasion I bought a medium sized brew bag which turned out to be monstrous for my small 15 litre pot. Hence the need to clip it up to the sides. Sadly even though it's rated for 100 degrees Celsius, my rubbish thin pot still managed to melt a part of it up top. I might have to apply some emergency stitching before the next brew.

Also I can't find my long thermometer anywhere and so for this batch, I had to borrow and sterilize my wife's roasting thermometer..
Luckily it still tells me the celcius numbers on the left and for our longer than usual (75 mins instead of 60) mash the tempt I needed was somewhere between cured ham and rare beef..

It still did the trick though so I was grateful for small meat testing mercies.

Now 75 minutes can seem like an age when waiting around for essential sugars to mash out so thankfully I have more than enough Hola Raspberry Cerevazas on hand to help pass the time..



And plenty of comics to help while away the minutes during brewing.



Right, mash step done. You can make your own jokes about what bit of fleshy anatomy you think this looks like here..



Rolling boil is next with the small (3.5 gms) of Perle hops thrown in at the start for bittering.



Let it cool. It was almost midnight when I finished so I let it cool overnight before the next steps.



Now this is the first gravity I have nailed in a long time. Usually I'm pretty far off the mark but this batch seemed to have nailed it. As long as the rest of the brewing goes well here, I think we may have a strong contender for best brew I've made all year (hopefully)



This hopefully will look as good as the Bazwiegan in time. And hopefully taste a darn sight better too!



Now since I'm working with Saflager yeast that seem to party harder in temps that are lower than Queensland living rooms, I've created a ghetto cooler that needs a daily update. Each morning and night I swap over the now thawed cooler bags ($4.95 each for a four panel one at Bunnings) for a pair of frozen ones. Thankfully this swamp cooler does bring things down to the wanted 18 degrees mark. I'll keep doing this until my Inkbird 308 arrives to plug into the little bar fridge we just picked up.

Temp control in my house? Yeah it was bound to happen sooner or later..



A couple of days later:



The Inkbird arrived! Courtesy of Amazon.com.au it took a little bit of a play around to get the hang of it (and then I read the instructions and worked out what I was doing wrong) but then I had a mini fridge that would come on when it wasn't cold enough and then switch on when it was so I had a range of 17-19 degrees where I wanted it to be.

For temp control, this things a beauty. No having to rewire anything it really is just plug and play. Or in this case, chill.



I dry hopped with some quality perle hops with four days to go and then cold crashed (dropped it down to 2 degrees celcious for the last two days to drop even more of the sediment out.) It hasn't come out as clear as clear but it still looked pretty sweet.



(You can see the line of green down the bottom where the hops have dropped out)

One problem with it being so cold though is that it takes an age for a sample to get back to room temp so you can work out a final gravity. I was getting 2 then 2.5% then 3.2% abv and climbing as it warmed up. It got up to 3.7% abv before I got bored of waiting and bottled the sample. So best guess? Around 4 % which is ideal.



(That's still pretty clear..)

Once again the kids pitched in and we had a scoop of dextrose and a cap on each bottle before you could say 'Wow, where did the morning go exactly?



Now to wait for the bottles to condition and of course the big day...Christmas!

Stay tuned!

Tis all done! But how did we go? Have a read here!