East Street Best Extra Stout, Bring a Toy, and Pizzas

This started life as a recipe on Brewers Friend for a clone of Coopers Best Extra Stout. I then adapted various malts, and also the hops, for what I had in stock. This left me with tiny amounts of various things, so their amounts in the recipe were rounded up to use them up completely. The result was pretty far from the original clone, so it needed a new name. In Grimsby, East street is where Hewitt Brothers cooperage was (the building still stands, see photo), so I thought it would that was a tenuous link I could use.

Being off work this week, I got up nice and early, at which point out youngest announced that it wasn't 'bring a toy to school day' but 'bring one of your parents old toys' to school, preferably along with the parent to talk about it. So I needed to be in school for 1.30pm. I also had agreed to pop in to Grimsby (about an hour or so) to get some grub for tea. The latter I was planning to do during the 90 min mash, and I also needed some yeast, as my fridge only had Crossmyloof Belgian and Californian yeasts in it. I really must get into yeast recovery and banking.

As it happened, I was in town slightly longer than expected, and the 90 min mash turned into a 105 min one. I also did two batch sparges, one for 15 mins, and the second for 30 mins that gave me time to nip to the primary school and talk about my toy Mk II escort (in blue). Then back home, and the second sparge was drained, and all the wort put into the boiler. I had managed to collect 20L, instead of the planned 19; how this happened I've no idea. I batch, rather than fly sparge and measure my water in and out of the HLT. I can only think I miscounted.

So, adjusted figures were pre-boil gravity 1051 (predicted 1048) and post boil 1060 (predicted 1059). Perhaps the extended mashing bumped the efficiency up a little?

The lovely cool autumnal , mains water got the wort down to 21 degrees with no drama, and Wilko's Nottingham was pitched, with the fermentation fridge set to 20.

That's my brewery(!) at 100% capacity ~ Kolsch in a water bath, ESB in bottles conditioning / carbing up in another and the stout in the fermenting fridge. I haven't got any more inkbirds to control anything, so until the ESB bottles are ready for cold conditioning, I will have to find something else to do.

I'm thinking along the lines of a home made heated brew cupboard to replace inefficient water baths, but we'll see.