There is no recipe to speak of… basically I made some dried wine yeast (10 teaspoons) into a starter with a little brown sugar boiled in water and cooled. Pitched it into the apple juice in the containers I collected the juice in (food grade 5 gallon plastic). The next day it was fermenting out of the top and all over the floor… so I took it outside for a few days until it had calmed down.

Today (about three weeks after it started), I transferred one of the containers into a Hambleton Bard plastic pressure barrel. While I was at it, I measured the brix reading. According to my calculations this gave it a final gravity of 0.996, which is less than 1. I thought that was impossible. Water has a reading of 1.0000. So I also measured it with my hydrometer and came up with the same answer. I then tested my hydrometer in water and that measured 1 as expected.

If this is correct then this would mean all the sugar has been fermented out, and it would have an alcohol by volume of 9%. Tasting it, it still has a lot of sweetness, and it has not finished fermenting (gas was still being produced in the fermenter).

How can it possibly have a gravity of less than one, and still taste sweet and be fermenting?

It tastes quite nice.. a bit of sweetness, but also that real cider bite to it. It doesn’t have a lot of that sulphor smell and taste that cider often has when it is young. Last year it took several months to become drinkable.

Maybe someone else wants to check my calculations:

Original Brix was 16.2%, which equates to about 1067 gravity. Other members of the brew group got similar readings.

Brix today is 5.7%, and a hydrometer reading is 0.996.

This gives me an abw of 7.3% and abv of 9.1%.

There must be some other explanation for both the refractometer and hydrometer readings to come back with such a silly value.

The plan was to collect two seperate runnings from the sparge, dilute the first runnings to match the second, and then treat both runnings the same in terms of hops, boiling, etc. Then to compare the tastes.

Recipe

The recipe is almost the same as the previous batch (Wild Hop Beer), which actually gives us 3 things to compare.

Giving total expected og=1048 and fg=1011

I expected to make two batches each of about half the normal amount of 25L, however things didn’t work quite to plan.

Mashing was more or less the same as before… 2.5Gallons of boiled water dropped to mash tun and cooled to 170F. Grains stirred in and temperature adjusted to 150F and left for 90 minutes.

This is when I realised my first major mistake… I had forgotten to put the manifold inside the mash tun! Not a problem I emptied out the mash into stockpot, replaced the manifold and put the grain back in and left to settle for a few minutes. The first runnings were very cloudy, so I recirculated the initial runnings for quite a while until they became clearer (note recirculating means collecting some wort in a jug from the run off tap and pouring it carefully back into the top of the mash tun).

My second mistake was not calculating what I was planning to collect. Partly this was because I had no idea on how the sugar level changes as sparging proceeds, and secondly because I hadn’t really thought about it, so had to quickly do some adhoc arithmetic.

I started sparging and collecting first runnings. Whilst sparging I regularly measured the brix against the amount of wort collected as I thought it could be useful in the future. The measurements I made were:

This needs to be put into a graph to make any sense of it.

Note I stopped collecting when brix was still 5% (aprox 1020 sg), because otherwise my second runnings would have become too dilute.

I ended up with two batches:

First Runnings: 14 Liters, brix=19.0%, og=1076
Second Runnings: 15 Liters, brix=8.2%, og=1033

First Runnings

Topped up with 15 Liters more water. After the boil was left with 15 Liters @ 15.4% brix to which another 8 liters of water were added to dilute it.

Hops at start of boil were:

Total ebu=18.7

15 minutes before end of boil, I added 10g Goldings and 10g Wild hops and teaspoon of Irishmoss.
5 minutes before end of boil I added 10g Goldings and 10g Wild hops.

Yeast was Brupacks top fermenting yeast made with a starter of 30g DME. This yeast was shared between the two batches.

Second Runnings

I didn’t dilute this as it was already fairly weak (15 Liters, og=1033).

Hops at start of boil were:

Total ebu=18.7

This is the same proportion as for batch 1 but reduced to account for lower volume.

15 minutes before end of boil, I added 6g Goldings and 6g Wild hops and teaspoon of Irishmoss.
5 minutes before end of boil I added 6g Goldings and 6g Wild hops.

After boil, brix=9.4%

Cooling was not a problem this time because Colin from the Oxford Brewing Group had provided me with extra tubing and fittings to connect the tap to the immersion chiller.

Fermentation

Both batches were fermented for 4 days and then racked to secondary fermenter where they stayed until May 22nd (5 weeks) and then bottled. Half the first runnings were put into a 10L polypin. Primed with 75g DME shared between both batches in proportion to volume.
First Runnings are in green-topped bottles. Second Runnings in Red-topped.

Results

Initial tasting while bottling is favourable… even without conditioning they both taste good, but the first runnings taste smoother.

I will be taking samples of both batches to the Taste and Swap tomorrow where I hope to get more feedback on the taste differences between them… although they have not had much time to condition.

Grain Bill

Expected og of 1042 and fg of 1010 giving abv of 4.4%

This was based on 25 liters with 82% efficiency.

Also added one teaspoon of Brupacks DLS.

Hops

Planned for around 25 ebu, using the wild hops mainly for aroma/flavour. As the wild hops were unknown, I estimated that they were Fuggles variety and had 4% alpha acid content.

Copper Hops:

Aroma hops:

Wild: 25g, 10 minutes before end of boil along with teaspoon of Irish Moss

Wild 25g 1 minute before end of boil.

Yeast

Packet of Brupacks top fermenting ale yeast. Used a starter of 25g DME in 1/2 pint of water, boiled for a few minutes and cooled. Also added teaspoon of yeast nutrient.

Process

This was in a new kitchen so my process was different than usual. In addition I had recently obtained a 60L stock pot and planned to boil on the gas hob instead of using the electric boiler. I expected that this would allow me to collect more run off from the sparge and allow for evaporation, whereas with the electric boiler I did not have room to allow for evaporation and had to top up the wort back to 25L.

25L of water was boiled in the electric boiler.

About 10 liters was dropped into my mash tun (picnic cooler) and left to cool to the strike temperature of 170F (Note I am using Farenheit here because that is what my thermometer measures in).

Grain was mixed into the water, and got desired mash temperature of 150F.

Left to mash for 90 minutes.

Whilst waiting for the mash I topped up electric boiler with water and reboiled. Then transferred into my sparge tank (a plastic bucket with a tap on it).

I sparged (using Phil sparging arm) and collected 25 Liters of wort with a brix reading of 9.8% (1040 og… slightly lower than expected).

The wort was put into the 60L stock pot and some extra water added (5.4L) to allow for some evaporation.

Wort was boiled on the gas cooker… the new cooker has a central ring that is much bigger than the others, but unfortunately this did not provide enough power to bring it to a vigorous boil, so had to also use one of the other rings as well.

I boiled for 90 minutes adding the hops and Irish moss at the appropriate times.

The next problem I encountered was that the cooker was now a long way from the sink (they used to be close to each other). I did not have enough tubing to get from the tap to the immersion chiller. Instead I simply placed the lid on the stock pot and left it overnight to cool.

The next morning, the wort was siphened (I don’t have a tap fitted to the stock pot yet) into fermenting bucket. To avoid infecting the wort with my mouth bacteria when starting the siphon I followed a tip that someone at the Oxford Brewing group suggested of putting a section of larger tube over the end to suck on and then removing it when the siphon started.

I only managed to collect 19L of wort (did not account enough for evaporation and trub loss). The brix reading of this was 10.2%.

Pitched the yeast and left it for 6 days to ferment. Transferred to secondary fermenter under airlock and left for 2 weeks before bottling (primed with 80g DME) on 11th February 2007.

fg = 1008, final brix = 5.4%, making an abv of 4.1%

Taste

Very nice, malty and hoppy. Certainly wouldn’t be disapointed if served this in a pub. The wild hopshave quite a strong after-taste, but this may mellow out after being left longer to condition.

I plan to take a few bottles to the Oxford Brewing Group’s Taste and Swap event tomorrow (2nd June 2007) to get some other people’s opinion.