Low Flying Crow

The weather was too lousy to get any jobs done in the garden today, so I decided to brew the low abv beer I've been planning. If it's any good I'll detail the recipe in another post when I review the beer. 

A very small bag of malt was all that was needed, and despite reservations of how things would go in the G40 with a total malt bill of just 2.4kg, everything was fine.

I did a single step mash at 79c for an hour. It was a fairly thin mash and I throttled back the circulation and there were no issues with the recirculation. 

After sparging I took a refractometer reading as the wort was coming to the boil and it indicated a pre-boil gravity of 1.024.

As my expected OG was only 1.025, it looked likely I'd overshoot this by the time the boil was done, and that proved to be the case.

Once it was all done and dusted the OG was 1.028, so we'll see how it goes. 

In other news, the Novalager beer will be being kegged tomorrow.

Still Learning

The Novalager beer was a bit of a disaster tbh. I screwed up the water treatment and ended up tipping it. I've re-brewed and it's currently in the FV with dry hops. I'll dump those in a few days and then get it in the keg and lager it for a few weeks. 

My next project is a low-alcohol beer. I do a banging pale ale with a hop combo that really hits the spot. As I like to sink a couple of beers in the evening during the week, I fancy doing a low alcohol beer, and using the same hop profile as this pale ale. 

It's going to be a bit hit and miss as the grain bill is less than the recommended minimum for the Grainfather G40 and I'm planning to use a yeast I've not used before, to keep attenuation as low as possible. 

The OG I'm targeting is 1.025 and if it finishes around 1.014 it'll make it about 1.4% abv. I did have a crack at this type of thing last year, but it wasn't quite what I was after. I've adjusted the malt bill slightly as the original was very pale and because it's such a small beer, that didn't help with the perception as it made it look 'thin' visually. Fingers crossed this will go well. I'll do a post on the brewday as soon as I've got a chance to get brewing - hopefully later this week.