Mark's Page

hey mark
you going to be in palmie over q's bday weekend? i'm up to visit my folks, maybe i should bring a brew or two and come over
Ed

sounds good, sat or sun is ideal for me anyway

all of those sound nice, i'll leave it to you to choose - whichever ones you either think are your best or else are the ones you want to get rid of!! i'll just bring a random selection.

hi again mark
thanks for letting me know about the phone, musta fallen out of my pocket when i was spouting forth......

i like it too. i think the low carbonation helps, but i maintain that adding in some calcium carbonate and sodium bicarbonate helps to balance the acidity of the roast malts. it had 420g roast barley and 170g chocolate malt in it so loads of dark grain.

btw i really liked your stout too, but for the opposite reason - that it had more bite. came with a good long lasting head and a nicely aggressive roast flavour, just what i wanted.

i will admit to being less keen on the weizen, which i thought was a bit dark, but the yeast flavour was really good - it's a great yeast and you obviously fermented at a good temp for it because the balance of banana and clovey stuff was just right. but then my preference for hefeweizen is for it to be very pale and that's just me; lots of good german examples are much more amber.

yeah i figured your stout was strong because i felt a bit heady after drinking the bottle!! mine's basically a fairly classic irish dry style stout - think it was otter, a bit of wheat malt, and the roast barley and chocolate already mentioned.

i like warm ferments for wheat beers. that yeast can handle up to about 26 or even 28C without too much bother i reckon. it's a great yeast imho.

yeah it's a pretty cool trick eh? apparently years and years ago before the advent of widget cans, guinness used to sell cans of lightly carbonated stout which came with a small disposable syringe attached to the can! apart from the cost of the syringes, and possible packing issues, i wonder if it lost favour because people didn't like looking like junkies when they drank their beer......

Hi Mark
Umm, well, yes, I have, but never very successfully. It's a beer that seems to have been changing too - a few years ago the inside goss was something like this for 20L:
3.5kg Pale malt
150g medium crystal
250g flaked maize
a bit of brewer's caramel
wyeast 1968
hops: target, challenger and northdown (not sure in what order, but to 31IBU).

I've read recently that they have stopped used the flaked maize and caramel and it might well be more like just pale malt plus 250g crystal....i believe the hops are much the same - helps to give that vague marmalade taste that their beers (especially ESB) have. the yeast is quite important too - i've never actually used 1968 but others have and i know they like it.

you in palmie over the xmas break?

It sounds like you may need to recirculate a bit more. The only time my one clogged up was with my Roggenbier, which stuck 4 times during the sparge. In the end, I gave up on clarity for that one... then during the boil this happened. It's all the small proteinacious particulates sticking onto the hot hot hot element.

I'd recomend at least 12 Litres of slow recirculation - the runoff needs to have no crap floating in it. No crap, means nothing can stick to the element. After the boil, a solid scrub down with steelo to bring the shiny back.

I can assure you that it should come back to normal. I have done at least a dozen boils with that Coffee Urn now - and only the one problem. 3 of the boils have been very big beers (1.080+): I thought I would run into problems with gravities like that... but never did.

Hope that helps bro.