Redemption Pale Ale & Brewing Beer Again After I Lost a Whole Batch!

Today I'm getting back on the horse after a disastrous brew failure last time round. To cut a long story short, I managed to ruin my last beer on brew day when I made a spur of the moment decision to add acid to my mash without planning it. I ended up with a beer that was undrinkable and a hard lesson about the dangers of making brewing decisions with no prior understanding. Lesson learnt.

So today I'm going to remake that beer but this time I'm going to do things right, and the first change I've made is to purchase bru'n water and plan out my recipe additions properly. Bru'n water allows you to more accurately make your acid additions by taking into account your current water profile and grain bill. So instead of guessing or trying to look up info on google at the last minute I'm going into this beer with a baseline that I can test and modify going forward.

 

Bru'n water also takes care of your other water additions and puts it all into one spreadsheet that you can save and use again. For my regular sulphate and chloride additions I'm going a little lighter today than I have been in the past and my water profile for this beer looks like this.

 

With my acid addition bru'n water is suggesting 2ml of phosphoric acid in my mash but I will back it off to roughly 1.5ml and see how that goes and if I need to add more I will do it in my sparge water later. After adding my mash additions its time to drain my sparge water for later on and get my bag in and my mash going.

 

My grain bill for this beer consists of 3.8kg of Gladfield ale malt (80.9%), 500gm of Gladfield light crystal (10.6%) and 400gm of Gladfield wheat (8.5%). I've lowered the base malt in the recipe slightly from 4.1kg to 3.8kg to lower my original gravity so I can get a beer closer to the 5% which is where I want to be for a typical pale ale and where I think a typical pale ale should be. And I will be mashing this beer at 66c so I've set my Digiboil to 67c which will keep the temperature in the 66c range for most of the mash.

 

At 15 minutes I pull my first sample to see how my PH is going and after a first test that is inaccurate I quickly recalibrate the PH meter and do a second test which gives me a reading of 5.58 which is 0.1 points lower than my last mash and show that the acid is working but needs to be a bit stronger next time. I decide to add extra acid to my sparge to make up for it and test the PH of a pre boil sample later on.

 

The mash goes well and at 60 minutes I lift the bag and rinse it in my 20L bucket with my acidified sparge water which has had an extra 1ml of phosphoric acid added. With the sparge now complete it's time to bring the wort to a boil and get my first hop addition ready. And it's now that I realise how bad the holes in my brew bag have gotten when I see lots of grain floating in my wort while straining off the hot break and It's that bad that it takes me roughly 10 scoops to get most of it out.  Sadly the quality of bags sold at many home brew shops in Australia is pretty poor,  I've only had this bag for 6 months and the holes started appearing after only a couple of brews. Luckily I have new one coming in the mail that should solve this problem but until then I'm stuck with sieving out grain from my wort.

 

I am shooting for 29 IBU's in the boil for this pale ale so I'm adding 20gm of Hallertau Magnum hops at 60 minutes. This will be my only boil addition apart from kettle finings and yeast nutrient which I will add with 15 minutes to go.

 

I take one last wort sample to test my PH and pre-boil gravity. My final PH reading comes in at 5.43 showing that the acid in the sparge has also worked and its now close to a normal level, and my pre-boil gravity comes in at 1044 which is a bit higher than expected so I will probably overshoot the 5% ABV range that I was aiming for.

 

With the 60 minute boil over it's now time to set up my pump again for recirculation while I do a whirlpool hop addition, but today I'll be using a wort chiller for the first time. Up until this point I've been doing the no-chill method for all of my beers in the 35L Digiboil and I've experimented with doing no-chill in both HDPE plastic cubes as well as in the kettle itself. I've had no problems with no-chill and the method of doing it in the kettle overnight is really easy to do and does save a lot of time on brew day. But there are times when I want to brew, chill and pitch my yeast on the same day when I only have one day to make beer. So for doing this I've purchased a cheap stainless steel immersion chiller, but I'll be using it with a twist, instead of using it as an immersion chiller with water running through it in the kettle, I'll be using it as an inline chiller with hot wort running through in in an ice bucket.

 

The chilling process goes very well for the first time and I am able to cool my wort from 75c to 35c in only 20 minutes! But the last 13c takes me another 20 minutes as I run out of ice blocks and have to use plain tap water. All up I'd say my first attempt at inline chilling was a success and it takes me 40 minutes and roughly 40L of water to chill my wort from 75c down to 22c where I can pitch my yeast. MY goal is to try and get the chill down to 30 minutes and 30L of water which I could then repurpose for rinsing and cleaning.

 

All up this was a pretty successful brew day and feel like I bounced back well after my previous disaster. I've learnt how to use Bru'n water and apply it to my brew day successfully and I've also started to understand how to use phosphoric acid in my brewing process properly as a result. I've also successfully chilled my beer using a new inline chilling method and I have plans to improve this and make it even more efficient going forward.

The video of this brew day will be up on my YouTube channel next week, so until next time, thanks for joining me today on this brewing adventure, cheers and brew on!