Another (brew) day under our belt - here's how it went.
We started out collecting our water - pH of the mash water adjusted to within the 5.2 - 5.6 range. For this particular brew we negated any further water adjustments, and went with our usual filtered tap water (to remove chlorine/chloromine). Our town water is decent with small amounts of sulfate, chloride and calcium.
22L of mash water - check.
5kg of Gladfield Pilsner Malt - check.
Mashed in - and with a fairly standard grain bill size it was pretty comfortable once it was all stirred through with a nice consistency that wasn't too thick and recirculated well.
Initial pH reading of 5.53 a little higher than ideal but still (just) in the 5.2 - 5.6 range which is ideal. I believe I added a little more acid to the mash to try and bring this lower - perhaps 0.5mL
Hitting target mash temperature of 65°C to get a highly fermentable wort, for a low finishing gravity and reasonably dry finish which is what you want in any lager style like this.
Evidently the additional phosphoric acid addition to the mash yielded very little change in the pH reading taken a short time later. Obviously need to be more aggressive with these additions during the mash as there is a much higher buffering capacity in the mash once all the grains are in.
100g of Nelson Sauvin hops - check.
Sparge time, and after lifting the grain basket we sparged with approximately 10L of water
Pre-boil gravity reading of 1.044 - exactly on target as per the recipe.
Pre-boil volume a tiny bit short of the expected 28L
Whilst waiting for the wort to boil, we measured out our 60 minute hop addition - 20g of Nelson Sauvin
Boil time!
First boil addition added at the beginning of the boil
Quite a bit of hot break and foaming, especially after adding these boil hops
Measuring out our second hop addition, also for 20g of Nelson Sauvin hops to be added with 10 minutes left in the boil
5g of yeast nutrients - check.
Half a whirlfloc tablet - check.
Whirlfloc and yeast nutrient ready to go
Our whirlpool hop addition was 42g of Nelson Sauvin hops, so this was measured out in preparation towards the end of the boil
At the end of the 60 minute boil we cooled the wort down using our immersion chiller to around 80-85°C for our whirlpool. The KegLand RAPT Temperature probe is great to use for this to get a more accurate temperature reading of the wort, since the built in BrewZilla probes are at the base of the unit and are skewed because of their proximity to the heating elements at the bottom.
After adding our whirlpool hop addition, you can see the wort change colour - we left it to recirculate using the whirlpool recirculation arm attachment for 15 minutes as per the recipe.
At the end of the whirlpool period we continued chilling the wort using the immersion chiller and took our original gravity reading of 1.052 - a couple of points higher than expected - actual reading was probably more like 1.049-1.050 based on the pre-boil gravity reading.
You can see the wort start to clear up as it cools down
Once close enough to our target temperature, we transferred to our Apollo Titan fermenter and pitched our Novalager yeast.
RAPT fermentation graph/profile
This beer went on to win second place in the pale lager category at the 2024 NSW Homebrewing Competition - check out the tasting results post below for more info.
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