last year
I harvested some fuggles hops from my garden and
dried them
bagged them and froze them and this year
I'm going to brew with them for the first time. No idea
of quality
of my hops so rather than doing an all grain brew
I'm just gonna see what the flavour of the hops is like by
by sticking them into a beer kit.
as late hops. I going to use
a Cooper's Canadian Blonde which is
past its best so
I've bought some newer yeast within its date and I going to add
Coopers Brew Enhancer Number Two
"Hmmm?"
so it shouldn't have too
heavy a malt body
so I'm hoping that the majority of the flavour comes from those late hops -
- the fuggles that I'm gonna add at... what would have been the end of the boil,
but obviously the kit is pre hopped, so I'm going to
steep them for about 15 minutes - the equivalent of
putting your hops in right the end of the
boil - and we'll see how it goes.
This time I'm going to
vary slightly from what I've done in the past - usually I've been a bit blase about
water-treatment. This time I'm going to -
even though I'm not brewing all grain 
where the salts are important for the
processes
of all grain brewing when you're mashing.  BUT, this time I'm gonna take care to get rid of
the chlorine for my tap water
I'm assuming that the water authorities have added chloramine, so instead of
just boiling I gonna get rid of the chlorine
by adding a quater of a campden tablet
crushed-up, and agitating the solution
allowing the chlorine to, pretty much,
instantaneously disperse
And then this brewing water I'm gonna put
in to a large vessel, a big
stock pot and heat that up
dissolve the brew enhancer - which is essentially
just sugars
some which are from malt extract
then I shall add my hops
so about 14 to 15 grams
added just before this comes to the boil
boil for fifteen minutes
"flame-out"
and the last 15 grams of hops in at flame-out
and left to steap
for 15 minutes
then add the contents of the beer kit,
make it up to the final volume with the
rest water which I've treated
and the - if it's at the right temperature -
we can aerate that wort and add the yeast
To cool this down, I've put the big stock pot in a sink
of cold water and I'm gonna stir that
until it cools. I'll have to periodically
change the water
because the cold water on the outside
is gonna warm up as this cools down
with heat exchange
or you could just keep the cold water running and over-flowing
another method of cooling down the wort
just involves buying more equipment
you can buy some form of heat exchanger, or
in its cheapest form to buy, pre-made,
or you can make yourself out of
copper piping, is an
immersion chillier where you immerse coils of
copper piping within the hot wort
 and run cold water through the
copper piping
 
 
and now that...
moderately cooled wort, now added to the cold water
which, again, was  pre-treated to remove chlorine
We now...
as ever, aerate the wort
and add our sachet of brewing yeast
this one, just within date, is a Mangrove Jack's
craft series M84 bohemian lager
so we've got a right old mish-mash of ingredients:
Canadian Blonde Cooper's kit,
brewed with a lager yeast,
and late hopped with fuggles
 
 
Then I'm gonna loosely cover that
and then leave it in a place that's not too warm and not too cold
I'm not precise about these things, but particularly with this yeast
its best fermented quite low
between 10 and 14 degrees
which is quite attainable early spring
in the UK
