the great beer race day 1

Day 1 of the Great Beer Race is complete. I managed, even though it was below freezing for most of the day, to complete the brew in a reasonable time for me. I started at 7:30 this morning with around 1100 litres of water in the hot liquor tank at 87.9˚C and running mains water! While I got the water temperature reduced to where we can usefully use it I weighed out the malt that the recipe demanded. By 8:15am I'd hydrated the grain into the mash tun and then, after checking the temperature was correct, left it to do it's thing for 90 minutes. During that time I received a stream of abuse from Andy and blew two fuses trying to get our jetwash to start. To say that it doesn't like the winter is an understatement.

I also discovered that while we had running water coming into the building one of our drains had frozen solid. Which was not helpful in keeping ahead of time.

The major problem I encountered today was clearing the mash. The grain acts as a natural filter that removes particulate matter and flour from the liquid and requires 'bedding down' before it works effectively. It took me a whole hour to make this happen because the batch of malt we are using is particularly floury and takes a long time for the filter to form. A whole bloody hour passed before I got the results that I was happy with.

Sparging was relatively uneventful, as was boiling the wart (the liquid that is gathered from the mash tun by sparging). Hops are added to the boiling liquid to add bitterness and flavour so at the end of the boil you have a very sweet, sterile, flavour packed liquid. It's then decanted, cooled and aerated to provide the optimum environment for the yeast to thrive in. I did get delayed by 10 minutes or so by Andy and Piers because they were bottling today and occupying the space I needed to be in to finish off preparing the fermentation vessel to receive the beer.
All the head that is erupting from the top of the fermentation vessel is ideal for yeast. Depending on the temperature today's brew should have fermented out by Monday and be ready for packaging. Once in airtight containers it then needs to sit and condition which can take from 7 days to 6 weeks again depending on conditions.

At 15:57 today I finished, turned off the lights, locked the door and went home. Eight and a half hours (minus 10 minutes for the delay) is Andy's target time. Will he do it? We'll know on Friday .. ..