Alcohol Free Homebrew

[Toxxyc Senior Member Find all posts View Profile Close Toxxyc]

Alright, so the long and the short:

I have a 1.1kg grain bill. I'm going to mash at higher temps to get less fermentables. From my quick calculations and using online guides and sources, I suspect I'll end up at around 0.25% ABV. To me that's low enough to not boil it AT ALL after the ferment, so I'm going to push for a slightly higher IBU in the initial boil.

On the hop profile, I'm planning it really simple. Admiral in the boil for bittering. It's a good bittering hop, giving notes of resinous citrus like orange along with some spices. It's a hop made for IPAs and APAs, so I think it's a great basis to start off from in terms of the bittering. For flavour and aroma I'm going to go for that experimental U1/108 hops I have in the fridge as well. It has a sweeter profile, with tropical fruits like lichi, guava or mango and also has a lemongrass and citrus note to it. I think these two will work together very well (in my head they do). I'll also dry hop with the U1/108 before bottling, so I can be sure that aroma is all there. Maybe even dry hop in the mini keg. Would be aweseome.

On the fermentation - it'll be pitched directly on the yeast cake from my previous brew - Mangrove Jack's M42 New World Strong Ale that was used to ferment the IPA bitter I'm bottling this weekend, so it's kinda perfect. The yeast has a high attentuation, so I hope it doesn't eat too much of the sugars, but it left the IPA bitter at 1.012 so here's to hoping. It has a neutral aroma profile, so you'll taste whatever malts I toss in there and it won't change the perception of the hops. I'll ferment at the normal 20°C I do all my brews, which is easy to maintain with my cooler-box-and-ice-packs-under-a-towel-method.

Anyway, yeah so that's it. Any thoughts/ideas I can do or change on this brew?

[Harhm Senior Member Find all posts View Profile Close Harhm]

If you want to split it keep a original and add some changes to one part of the beer but keep it separate to the bottle for comparison.

I like your last idea better.... go for it.

[Toxxyc Senior Member Find all posts View Profile Close Toxxyc]

If you want to split it keep a original and add some changes to one part of the beer but keep it separate to the bottle for comparison.

I like your last idea better.... go for it.

I didn't think about splitting it anyway. Think I'm going to do just this - before the dry hopping I'll tap off a small batch and play around with that, see what I can do with it. I'll keep it completely separate and then see what comes of the ABV!

[groenspookasem Banned Find all posts View Profile Close groenspookasem]

Keen to hear the outcome on this brew

[Toxxyc Senior Member Find all posts View Profile Close Toxxyc]

Alright, so this weekend was "the time". Saturday, to be precise. Our wonderful, 36°C Saturday.

I started out the morning with some friends over to finish off some beers I had so I could use the bottles. Why? Well, because I needed bottles. Because the previous beer (Munton's IPA Bitter) was still in the fermenter, for a respectable while at this stage. Want to see how that one turned out (so far)? Check here. Anyway, we finished off a few bottles and a mini keg during a "beer breakfast". You can have champagne during breakfast, so why not beer?

Anyway.

Now they're gone, and I get to work. I borrowed a big-ass urn from a forum member (@langchop) to see how this AG/BIAB thing will go. Great oke, so big props and a sincere thanks to him!

Back to brewing! I put a bunch of water in the urn. 15l, it looks like. Respectable amount. I'm aiming for a strike water temp of around 71°C so I turn the urn's thermostat to JUSt under 70°C. I leave it for about 45 minutes, look up to see it's on "keep warm", so it hit temperature. Take my probe thermometer, dump it in the water. 88°C. Aww yay.

Overshot the temp by far. So I take off the lid off the urn, turn it off and wait. For almost an hour. During this time I get started on bottling the beer currently occupying my fermenter. Sanitize the bottles, wash out the mini keg, etc. Halfway into bottling I check on the temps and they're at 69°C. Close. Turn up the thermostat a little bit, set the probe thermometer in the urn and set the alert alarm for when it hit 70°C, which it does in a matter of seconds. Turn the thermostat so that it's at the current temp and hold it there.

Next step - sink the brew bag. It's a lekker big bag so it goes over the entire rim with ease. It's deep, so it goes lekker deep into the water. Probe of the thermometer is still in the kettle, just above the element on the protective grid. I reckon it's a good spot to check for temps, since the wort above will be slightly cooler. So I set the thermometer to 72° so it'll warn me when temps go a tad high, I added the grains and stirred. Water temperature dipped to 69°C again, but I turned up the heat to get it to 70°C again. Set the timer for an hour, and continued on the bottling. I stirred twice during the time of the mash as well, just FYI, and the temps stuck at 70°C for the duration.

Right, so mash is done. I lift up the bag and the first thing I see is...holy crap it's heavy! 1kg of grains take up A LOT of water! Anyway, I lift up the bag and now I realize how frigging dark the wort is. I completely overshot the colour I was aiming for, but more on that later. So I squeeze the bag a bit, burn my hands like mad, and realize this ain't gonna work. I need to find something to place this bag in. Bag in hand I kinda hobble over to the cabinet where the pots are, and wort is dripping all over the kitchen floor. Seriously glad wife's not seeing this. Get a pot, dump the bag and now I'm taking a look at this situation.

Got a pot with a hella hot bag in it, and I don't know how to get the water out. I know about sparging, so I turn on the kettle. Halfway into pouring the hot water over the grains I realize I'm just making my problem worse - I'm going to burn even more. So I stop. Squeeze the bag as much as I could and pour that wort into the urn. I then sparge with cold water, because it needs to cool down. At that cooler temp I manage to get the grains pretty dry by squeezing the bag and add that wort to the urn.

Great. I'm at about 14l in the urn remaining, so not a lot of loss. Now for the boil. Probe thermometer is back into the urn and I turn up the heat. A lot. Set the probe to 98°C because we mos boil cooler than at the coast.

Yeah no.

Thing screams like mad a 98°C but no boiling. So I turn it to 100°C. Same story. The wort only starts to boil when the temperature hit 102°C.

No worries. I add my 60-minute hop addition. I'm not entirely sure what the weights were (I wrote it down at home, so I'll have to check), but I think it was 10g Admiral and 6g U1/108. I decided on this combo as the Admiral has good bittering qualities and the U1/108 apparently has good tropical flavours when it's boiled for a long time. So I boil them for a long time. Set a timer for 45 minutes and wait.

At 45 minutes I add my 15-minute hop addition. I add more U1/108 for flavour, and I think here I added 8g. Could be 6g, but I'm not sure. Anyway. It's boiling.

After 15 minutes I turn off the kettle, and then my issue hit. Now I need to cool this shit down. I read all kinds of bad things about wort that stays too hot for too long, so I'm worrying now. With the urn turned off I'm expecting the temperature to drop slowly, but it doesn't. Langchop took this double-wall urn and insulated the gap between the walls, meaning this thing keeps heat. It keep heat WELL.

Plan B. I kinda expected this, so during the previous week I've been running and ice machine to make some ice for me should I need it. Clean water, no worries.

Well I need it. I start adding ice. And more ice. And more ice. And more. Suddenly I'm out of ice. Thermometer still reads 64°C. So what now? OK, cold water from the fridge (also clean, don't worry). Doesn't do much. 63°C.

I'm out of ice and out of cold water, so I do the only thing I can do - let it sit and cool down on it's own, while I hope and pray there's no trouble with the wort. I start a fan and let it blow on the urn as well. No difference.

Now at this stage I need to point out that my plan was to pour cooled wort directly onto the yeast cake in my fermenter. Obviously this isn't going to work, so I go to work on the yeast cake. I swirl it up and pour it out into two clean glass bottles. I lid them and set them aside to separate. I need to harvest the yeast and get rid of as much of the previously fermented beer, no?

So I just rinse out the fermenter to get rid of the old krausen ring and decide to pitch the still warm wort into the fermenter. I do so. It's a mess, it splashes everywhere out of the tap of the urn. Eh. I'll clean up later. During this time I remember I have some lactose in the pantry and figure I'll just toss it in there as well. What's there to lose? I weigh it out - 140g - and add.

With the wort into the fermenter and see I'm 6l short to my aimed volume. Add clean, cold water. Temperature in low 50's now. Still waaaay to hot to pitch yeast. I place the fermenter in my cooler box and pack it with ice packs. Cold, wet towel draped over the top to aid cooling. It's not working lekker. After an hour the stick-on thermometer still glows on the 40°C mark. I'm out of ice, I'm out of ice packs and I got nothing left. I stick a bottle of frozen milk in there. Slooooowly the temperature starts to come down.

By now it's bedtime. It's 22:00 and the wort is still warm. The stick-on thermometer reads 32°C. The yeast has been washed and it's clean. I just have no other choice, it's bedtime and I can't let the wort sit like this. The fermenter has not been sanitized and something WILL happen. So I pitch the yeast. The entire cake. I had the yeast at room temp, at least, and the outside temperature of 36°C means the yeast is at least close to the wort temperature. Not ideal, but eh. Can't keep worrying over this. I sink the airlock, wet the towel again, add the last bit of ice that the ice machine has been making during this time on top of the towel so it can trickle cold water down the side of the fermenter and go to bed.

At around 2:30 I wake up. I get up to check on the wort, because I'm worried. Torch in hand I turn off the alarm, unlock the security gate and head to the kitchen. Whole house smells like chocolate wort. I'm happy, wife not so much. Anyway, get to the fermenter and check the temps. YES! It's coming down, the milk bottle is working, along with the ice. It's at 24° and coming down. Not too bad. Luckily the M42 yeast is a very clean yeast, so I can only hope it didn't stress too much.

Anyway, Sunday morning I took a look again and found the fermenter at 20°C. That's my target temp, so I'm happy. I keep adding ice and ice packs to keep it there, check through the lid and see some foaming on top. Only a little bit, but there's activity - YAY.

During the course of Sunday I leave it alone, and last night I took a look inside. There's a krausen ring. Not big, not thick, at all, but that's to be expected. There's a definite CO2 smell, but nothing else. No off smells yet, which is GREAT. Close it up and let it sit.

This morning I checked on it. The smell from the fermenter is great. There's CO2, but there's also sweet chocolate notes and some great hop aromas coming off. I took a tiny little taste test and, to be honest, I think it's OK. I expected a much more watery brew, but it actually had pretty good aroma and flavour. Body is a bit on the down-low, but that's to be expected. It has a sweet-ish caramel-chocolate taste, and it reminds me of a stout. Wasn't what I was aiming for, but it did give me some good ideas.

[Toxxyc Senior Member Find all posts View Profile Close Toxxyc]

Now, some notes.

I overshot the colour with the roasted malts. I wanted to add some roasted malts to give the beer a deeper colour and not just look like diluted pee. Turns out 30% of the grain bill was a bit too much, maybe. On that note, I'm glad I did, since the caramel chocolate flavours with the added sweetness of the lactose is actually not bad.

I love BIAB/AG brewing. I immediately saw what I could change, what I should change and how I can tweak recipes with this. It's opened up a whole new world for me, to be honest, and I'm seriously happy I tried this. Suddenly my death-by-chocolate sweet stout I've been meaning to try is now a reality, since I don't have to guess what the kits will turn out like. I can tweak my recipe to my liking! I can do hop additions as I please and tune the flavour and aroma to my heart's content. It's fantastic!

Oh yes, and on the gravity. I aimed for 1.012 according to the online calculators. I hit 1.011. That's pretty close to my target gravity, even if I have to say so myself!

Finally, spent grains. I dumped it all into a pot and figured I'll dry it and make dog biscuits out of it. However, it had already gone sour by Saturday evening. This heat definitely didn't do it any good, so I dumped it in the garden. How should one go about drying it if you want to use it for something other than compost?

[Toxxyc Senior Member Find all posts View Profile Close Toxxyc]

And finally, some pictures! Adding the grains:



After the mash and checking on the colour:



Gravity before pitching the yeast:




Next morning - some activity!




And it's fermenting with a tiny krausen ring!

[The Flying Brew Senior Member Find all posts View Profile Close The Flying Brew]

Keen to hear how this beer turns out. Bottled a 2.8% abv lager yesterday which I thought was already enough of a stretch.

[Simple Member Find all posts View Profile Close Simple]

As far as the dog biscuits go, I don't bother to dry the spent grains. I'm not sure why this is necessary? My recipe is:
4 cups spent grain
1 cup peanut butter
2 eggs
Throw it all in the Kenwood and add cake flour until mix is dry enough to roll out to approx 3 or 4mm thickness. Anywhere between 2 and 6 cups.
Bake in the oven at 180C for about 25 to 30 minutes.

[Langchop Senior Member Find all posts View Profile Close Langchop]

Well... all sorts of curveballs makes for a great learning experience! Thanks for the lighthearted description of your adventure.

Also, sorry, I really should have thought of/ lent/ suggested rubber gloves

Your temp probe is probably out by a good few degrees cos ,except for unusual alignment of the planets with Mars, it should only boil below 100 deg.

[Toxxyc Senior Member Find all posts View Profile Close Toxxyc]

Well... all sorts of curveballs makes for a great learning experience! Thanks for the lighthearted description of your adventure.

Also, sorry, I really should have thought of/ lent/ suggested rubber gloves

Your temp probe is probably out by a good few degrees cos ,except for unusual alignment of the planets with Mars, it should only boil below 100 deg.

Well it was fun, so light-hearted it should be.

And I guess the temperature difference is because I measured at the bottom of the urn, right at the element, so I guess the top is a few degrees cooler. Dissolved sugars will also slightly raise the boiling temperature. I've tested the probe and it's quite accurate, but it did lie in the sun for a few hours on Christmas day when I used it in the Weber. Maybe I should send it back and get an exchange. I'll test it a bit this afternoon and take a look - compare it to the stick-on thermometer's temperature. One or two degrees off is OK for my use, it's mostly for making sure meat is cooked to temp for me

[jakeslouw Senior Member Find all posts View Profile Close jakeslouw]

Frigging hilarious, sounds like our first BIAB, pure chaos..........

[groenspookasem Banned Find all posts View Profile Close groenspookasem]

Important thing here is that you managed to get your first AG brew under the belt, good thing that you wrote down the process, it will give you a solid idea on where to improve on. For instance, chilling the wort (instead of pitching stuff into it, rack to a bucket and put the bucket into a ice water bath) If your missus won't allow you to mess up the bath, a 45l muck bucket is cheap enough and could work quicker to immerse the fermenter bucket into your ice slurry. Then again, unimpressing your missus could result in her enthusiastic approval of additional gear purchases ? :-)
Would a colander work to suspend your grain brew bag over the urn to drip into your wort?
I'm not au fait with biab, just spitballing here. What time did you start?

[Toxxyc Senior Member Find all posts View Profile Close Toxxyc]

Important thing here is that you managed to get your first AG brew under the belt, good thing that you wrote down the process, it will give you a solid idea on where to improve on. For instance, chilling the wort (instead of pitching stuff into it, rack to a bucket and put the bucket into a ice water bath) If your missus won't allow you to mess up the bath, a 45l muck bucket is cheap enough and could work quicker to immerse the fermenter bucket into your ice slurry. Then again, unimpressing your missus could result in her enthusiastic approval of additional gear purchases ? :-)
Would a colander work to suspend your grain brew bag over the urn to drip into your wort?
I'm not au fait with biab, just spitballing here. What time did you start?

A lekker large colander will definitely work wonders, as will rubber gloves. A wort chiller is a must. I considered cooling the wort in the sink in some large pots in an ice bath, but the ice simply didn't cool it fast enough. I didn't have enough ice, so I honestly do think I'll have to get a wort chiller at some point, or freeze larger bottles and things with water in. A frozen 5l water bottle dunked in the wort should cool it lekker quick, actually.

Anyway, yeah, I started WAY too late. Most people start heating water at around 07:00 from what I gathered. I had less grains so I figured I could shortcut it, but that's not smart. I started at around 10:30. So my brew day took about 12 hours. I think I need to get an additional bucket for sure, I can bottle from it, cool in it, etc.

[groenspookasem Banned Find all posts View Profile Close groenspookasem]

Using a wort chiller does make life easy, not only does it save water, but time too. I supplemented mine by adding another "submerged in ice copper coil" on the "in" line to the GF's wort chiller, this works a treat. I used 6kgs of ice yesterday, but dropped from 100c to 25c in a short space of time (disclaimer, i run on water only until it reaches 68c then i add ice to the copper coils)

When I use kveik the wort is chilled to 38C and it then uses around 2 or 3 kgs of ice to get there.