Hello!

[Steve]

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Hi,

I've just signed up as wanted a decent calculator, but am looking forward to becoming part of the forums and also logging my recipes and finding new ideas!

I'm Steve, I'm 37 (for another 6 weeks) and I live in a village in Derbyshire in the UK.

I recently moved house, which has enabled me to be able to move from kits to Extract.

My first Extract brew was on 2 July 2017. Made a couple of small errors (main one being whilst steeping the grain temp crept just above 80C for a few mins until I spotted it an dropped it down again!)

I've done several kits at the old house, but the FV always ended up on an exercise mat, on the tiled floor in a draughty kitchen - not great for temp control - suffice to say, 75% of all brews turned out pretty horribly!

Now in the new house, I was kindly donated an old fridge, invested in an STC-100 and brought my old brew belt out of retirement. I now have a fully functional brew fridge at the back of the garage :D

My first Extract brew (listed as my only recipe at the moment) was almost a carbon copy of a friends IPA recipe - I thought I had better copy one that was proven to taste nice, so that know if it's a success or not!

I did the boil on 2 July 2017, - boiled 6 litres of water and put in the FV to cool, boiled another 6 litres for the actual boil, immersion cooled (made my own cooler from 10mm copper pipe and hose pipe), poured (through a sterylized muslin square - slowly) into my 15 litre FV. Topped up with some more boiled/cooled water. ended up with just short of 12 litres (1.5kg of light DME and 250g Crystal crushed grain steeped). Into the brew fridge at 19.5C for 9 days. Dry hopped after 7 days. increased the temperature last night (day 9) to 22C for the diacetly rest. Will leave at 22C for 4 days. At the weekend will squeeze and remove hops and then reduce the temperature to 2-3C for a further 4 days.

After the time has lapsed I'll rack into a pressure barrel, then I'll connect my bottling wand to the PB tab and bottle from there. I have a bag of Coopers carbonation drops for use this time, but will probably add sugar to the PB prior to racking onto it next time.

Also think I'll attempt a larger volume next time too... trying to find out the maximum DME/Water Volume ratio I can work with.. would like to do an 18 litre batch - boil 2 x 6litres and leave to cool in a 23 litre FV, then use 6 litres for my final boil, but this would take around 2.25kg of DME - need to figure out if it's possible in just 6 litres of water....

Anyway, that's a bit (lot) about me.

Looking forward to joining in!

Thanks,

Steve.
 
Congrats on the temp controlled chamber.steve makes you fell better leaving your Fermentation in safe hands when you go to work;)

Welcome.
 
Welcome Steve, and amen for temperature control, I love my lagers, I have one glass door refer, and I'm purchasing another one and a chest freezer, one of the refers will be 48° fermentation chamber, the other will be 32° cold crash chamber/lager chamber,

The chest freezer will be converted into a Keezer, I should be able to handle 18 to 20 corny kegs in total.

Wish you the best of luck brewing, I'm a pilsner fan so feel free to ask questions if you have any about pilsner, ill try to help you out.
 

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