1st brew on the gear formerly known as the Liberty Pilot Brewery

As Joking mentioned in a previous post, he made me a pilot brewery. I got this on Monday and yesterday I finally got around to playing around with it. I like to get straight to the point and instead of brewing a pale ale just to see how the system worked I went for gold, pushed the system to the max and made a big barley wine. This is also sort of a tribute to our first child who can arrive any day now, I plan on cellaring it for as long as possible,hopefully for 21 years...:)

If it turns out good, I might make a commercial batch. I have been working on making an all NZ hoped barley wine, but they usually get too sweet, so this time I'm trying to break it up a bit with a bit of sharp piney Simcoe:

A ProMash Recipe Report

Recipe Specifics
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Batch Size (L): 60.00 Wort Size (L): 60.00
Total Grain (kg): 28.10
Anticipated OG: 1.110 Plato: 25.89
Anticipated SRM: 20.7
Anticipated IBU: 147.5
Brewhouse Efficiency: 75 %
Wort Boil Time: 120 Minutes

Formulas Used
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Grain/Extract/Sugar

% Amount Name Origin Potential SRM
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89.0 25.00 kg. Pale Malt(2-row) Great Britain 1.038 3
3.6 1.00 kg. Crystal 55L Great Britian 1.034 55
5.3 1.50 kg. Crystal 75L Great Britian 1.034 75
2.1 0.60 kg. CaraAroma 1.030 150

Potential represented as SG per pound per gallon.

Hops

Amount Name Form Alpha IBU Boil Time
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150.00 g. Warrior Pellet 17.40 121.1 120 min.
150.00 g. Nelson Sauvin Pellet 13.00 13.7 1 min.
150.00 g. Simcoe Pellet 12.00 12.7 1 min.
150.00 g. Nelson Sauvin Pellet 13.00 0.0 0 min.

Yeast

Wyeast 1272 American Ale II
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I may have been a bit too optimistic about the size of the mash. The mash tun was litterally full to the brim and it was pinfull to see it spill over and mess up Jo's beautiful craftmanship! There was a lot of messing around and as a result I hit 62C instead if the planned 67. Oh well, I was planning on adding some table sugar to the fermenter to boost attenuation but that might not be necessary after all.

After 10 mins of recirculation, sparkling clear wort goes in the kette.

The sparge is gravity fed and super easy to work.

I forgot to take a picture of the chilling process, but I whirlpooled with the immersion chiller in the background which took the wort down to 20C in about 20 mins. Then I took the chiller out and continued whirlpooling for 10 mins, let it settle for 15 mins and transfered into my good old buckets.

Nice pile of trub, I got a bit in the fermenters as well, but not enough to worry me. I might install some kind of screen around the outlet to make the wort even clearer,

50 liters final yield, not too shabby for a first go.

Bit of a quick writeup, I need to go clean the garage before I get invaded by fruitflies!

Thank you Joseph, this system is awesome! Now I just need to build some kind of stand to put it on, the floor doesn't do it justice!