Moving my blog

I've recently set up a new blog for my brewing escapades and have decided to use Wordpress after seeing the quality of the blogs of friends who use it.

So the new location is now at http://ozrichramblings.wordpress.com/

I hope to see you there!

Rich

Brewing update

I haven't started brewing yet because after making the cool box I found that the temperature of the cold water in the tap was 26 degrees, four higher than the wort needs to be brought down to for fermentation. This means that I really do need to get a fridge and modify it with a temperature controller.

Once I get the fridge I will update the blog with details of my first brew.

Oh yeah, and the wedding venue are happy for me to bring along homebrew to serve on the day. I will e making some lager for the Aussies and some decent ale for us Brits. Finally I might give cider a bash midway through next year for a number of mates who like it - plus Chris who is coeliac and can't drink beer with the rest of us.

Brewing gear

Today I put together a box in which to ferment my first brew. I plan to place frozen bottles of water into the box to keep the temperature down and keep a constant 20 degrees Celsius.

The box is made from two plastic crates and it is lined with foam and then covered with bubble wrap which our sofa came wrapped in. I have gaffer tapes it all together to try and ensure that it stays relatively water tight as I expect there to be a fair amount of water condensed off the frozen water bottles.

The photos I am including in this post show:
A) the boiler placed on a work bench with a rope and pulley above for use with the 'Brew In A Bag' method - this will be used to hang the grain in the bag to drain the wort out after it has mashed.
B) the fermenting box
C) the fermenting box open with the fermenter sitting inside the box
D) the boiler

Since I am posting from my phone the order of the photos may get a bit mixed up so apologies for that.

Second archery session and beer making moves closer

I had my second session of archery at the weekend and shot for about 3-4 hours. I was shooting 30m for a good while and probably had on average one shot in 10 go awry and miss the target but was consistently hitting with the rest and normally within the red although to be honest they didn't group very well.

I then moved up to 40m and 50m and bizarrely got better at the long distance than I was at the shorter distances! Next move is to try and figure out what type of now I should buy and then work out where to get it from. I'm currently contemplating importing one from the UK or somewhere else because they are pretty expensive over here.

On the beer front - I now have pretty much all the kit I need to brew my first beer. I still don't have a fridge for total temperature control but I shall experiment with the cardboard box an frozen water bottle method for now as the homebrew shop guy said he made a really good beer in summer using that method - got him a 4th place In a beer comp.

So I shall first practise by just boiling up some water - work out how to hold it at the right temps and then put into my fermenter to be kept as close as possible to 20 degrees for about 5-6 days. I will also experiment with agitating the water two or three times a day as I would with a Ringwood type yeast.

Archery

Yesterday I went along to a session at the local archery club for a 'have a go' evening. I really enjoyed it and soon started getting pretty good groupings of my arrows and even think I got around 50-60% golds which I was very happy with. Admittedly it wasn't a vast distance, probably 25 metres or so.

I shall be continuing and think I'll try and get into it properly, and possibly buy my own gear in a few months if things are going well.

Mount Stuart ride

Today I decided to cycle to the top of Mount Stuart, a hill in the locality which has the television and radio masts mounted at the top, and is therefore visible from most parts of Townsville.

The ride to get to Mount Stuart Road is about 15km and this is then followed by a 9km uphill ride to the top. From looking at a few cycling websites such as mapmyride.com I have found that it is made up predominantly of category 3 climbs with some category 2 road towards the top. I have done category 3 rides before, most recently the climb up to the top of Castle Hill, but it turns out that this was not enough preparation for what I found when I got there.

So for today, I have managed to ride about one third of the length of Mount Stuart Road which got me pretty high , but there is still a long way to go to get to the top. I took a picture from a decent spot on my way down - apologies for the quality as it was just snapped on my iPhone.

Tomorrow I intend to get up another hairpin or two before heading back - I may possibly walk to the top if I feel able, but that may still take another hour or so!

Brewing - it's a complicated business

Well it is if you are living in the tropics at any rate.

Since my last post about brewing I have received and extensively read Graham Wheeler's 'Brew Your Own British Real Ale', published by CAMRA (The CAMpaign for Real Ale) which details the technique and recipes requires to make a number of British Real Ale clones. Examples are Old Speckled Hen, Marston's Pedigree, Bass Draught and about 100 other ales and stouts.

The biggest thing I have learnt is temperature control. As I write this entry it is 28.4 degrees Celsius at 10:27am. Beer yeast works between 18 and 22 degrees and currently we only get that at night. Controlling the temperature is critical to prevent the yeast from going off which happens when it gets too hot (bad smells, tastes, and a tendency to induce thumping hang-overs) or from dropping into the beer if it gets too cold.

Following an introductory talk at the local brew shop at the weekend detailing how to make lagers (he called it English Ale but it was kegged with CO2 and was most definitely a lager) using Malt Extract rather than kits, I discovered that adding a temperature controller to a fridge is a relatively simple process and I can get a controller for $70 from the shop. I believe making an open ferment beer inside a fridge should be ok, so long as I open the fridge every day to release excess CO2 build up and to get a change of air inside the fridge to try and more accurately replicate the traditional open cask ferment used by the British brewers.

So the current item on the shopping list is a fridge - hopefully I'll find one for under $80 or so - fit the temperature controller and then I shall start the brewing! I also have a second demo to watch this weekend at the brew shop - very helpful people - which is giving an intro into all grain brewing which is what I intend to pursue once I have done one or two brews. So next weekend I may begin buying my first few bits of kit - boiler, fermenter, thermometer, hydrometer and possibly an extract, some malt and some hops in preparation for the first brew.