Last Thursday (23.6) I had a go at brewing my first two all-grain batches of beer. First a Centennial Blonde, a hopefully light and refreshing summer ale, and then a Fresh Squeezed West Coast IPA, a heavily hopped American IPA.

Here are the slightly modded recipes I used:

Centennial Blonde

3.5kg Pale Ale Malt
0.35kg CaraPils
0.25kg Light Crystal
0.25kg Vienna Malt

10g Centennial 55min
10g Centennial 35min
10g Cascade 20min
10g Cascade 5min

Nottingham Yeast

19 Liters

OG was ~1.043 (10.6 brix)
IBUs should be around 25-30

 

Fresh Squeezed IPA

5.8kg Pale Ale Malt
0.5kg CaraPils
0.5kg Light Crystal
0.25kg Munich Malt

14g Chinook 90min
14g Simcoe 90min
7g Chinook 60min
7g Simcoe 60min
7g Chinook 30min
7g Simcoe 30min
21g Chinook 15min
21g Simcoe 15min
14g Amarillo 15min
28g Cascade 10min
14g Chinook 0min
21g Simcoe 0min

US-05

19 Liters

OG should have been around 1.070, but mine ended up ~1.060 (14.8 brix)
IBUs should be around 100

 

Here are some pictures from the brewday:

My mashtun, made from a 32L Coolbox from Etola, wrapped in a layer of camping mattress from Clas Ohlson. Have also fitted a tap and a stainless steel braid as a filter.

 

Here is the interior of the mash tun. You can see the filter.

 

I brought everything expect the Carapils premilled (as I had some uncrushed Carapils left), so I had to bring out my Corona mill to get the malt crushed. Luckily it wasn’t much that had to be crushed.

 

Here is a picture of the mash.

 

I’m draining the wort into my homemade boiler. It is made out of a 35L polypropylene tun, to which I have fitted 3 water boiler elements (900W) and a tap.

 

Another picture of the boiler. The electric safety isn’t the best, will have to work on that later.

 

Sparging the mash. Turns out I fly sparged, even though I was planning to batch sparge, which means my efficiency was quite low, meaning I ended up with a little lower OG than expected for my IPA. Next time I will try batch sparging.

 

Here are the hop additions for the Centennial Blonde.

 

Here are the hop additions for the Fresh Squeezed IPA. Lots of hops!

 

Here is the boiler in action. Hot break is forming, no boil yet.

 

The boil is chilled to fermentation temperature with a 8m copper immersion chiller. Worked great!

 

Finally the wort ended up in the fermenting vessel together with the yeast. In a couple weeks time I will hopefully get to taste some great beer!