Well its been a double batch weekend with a few issues with both batches.

Saturday I brewed a 5 imperial gallon batch of MO / Galaxy SMaSH A Single Malt Single Hop Aussie Pale Ale. I have heard it said many times that a good way to get to know your malt and hops is to brew SMaSH that way you can see how a change of malt or a change of hop will affect the beer. So that was what prompted me with this recipe.

I don’t know if I managed to knock my manifold whilst doughing in or what, but when it came to first runnings, I couldn’t get the grain bed to settle and I kept plugging with grain. Turns out that the manifold had come apart at one point letting grain in and this then limited my efficiency as there was a tendency for the sparge water to channel instead of evenly rinse the grains. Thinking about it I could have emptied the mash tun into a fermenter, fixed the manifold, poured it all back in and carry on as normal, however at the time I just made do and ran the wort through a filter bag before putting it into the boiler.  This left me about 7 points down on my pre-boil estimated gravity and about 8 points down on post boil. So I ended up pitching into a 1.040 instead of a 1.048 wort. This is in the fermenting freezer and fermenting well. Galaxy Smash recipe

 

Today I decided to do a small batch Brew In A Bag (BIAB) I had some ingredients here I wanted to use up and thought I would get a bit more experimental and just throw a load of stuff at Beersmith and see what came out. I started with a 22B Smoked Other Beer BJCP class And looked to see what I had that needed using up. So Ended up using Smoked malt, Rye malt, Marris Otter, Cara-pils, East Kent Goldings and a pack of Coopers yeast. may not be a more experienced brewers first choice of combination, however it was what I had to hand that needed using up and a chance to try something different in a small batch. I tried to estimate the volumes needed based on Beersmiths recommendations for a BIAB and ended up with quite a bit too much water so ended up pitching into a 1.048 wort instead of the estimated 1.074 Smoky Malt recipe

So both beers are going to come out lower alcohol than expected but hopefully they will still both be interesting and hopefully nice.