Friday 19 May 2017

Fermenting #3: Coopers Gir Kesar (Mango Lager)

The Mango Lager has finished its work fermenting the mango pulp that was added on Wednesday, 3 May 2017, it took only a couple of days to get back down to a FG of  1.010. Then since then it's been cold crashing for the last 10 days.

Was going to bottle it all up this afternoon, but there seems to be quite a bit of mango pulp floating around in the fermenter above the tap.


I gave it a "slosh" around to maybe help the layer start to settle but it's just stuck there refusing to budge.

I have some Leaf Gelatine that I was going to experiment with, as many home brewers use gelatine to get their beers to clear. So I thought that since I have nothing to loose I decided to add some to this batch to hopefully get that layer to the bottom so I can bottle this batch up.
 
So what I have done in soaked two Gelatine Leaves in 300ml of cold tap water for 5 minutes, then microwaved the liquid in short blasts until the temperature reached 70'c. Then added this directly into the primary (hot). I'll let it sit at a cold temp (6-8'c) for a few more days and see what happens.


Wednesday 3 May 2017

Fermenting #2: Coopers Gir Kesar (Mango Lager)

The Final SG of the coopers lager has now been at 1.010 for the last few days so today I added BOTH tins of mango. 1.7kg of mango pulp in total and gave it a good stir up.
The beer before adding the mango tastes fine, not like a Lager mind you, more Ale like. So at least I now know that my yeast bank is working okay.

So that's about 340g of extra fermentables added to the mix. It's gone a great colour, not sure how long to leave this fermenting now, but at least a week I expect.

Rechecked the current SG AFTER adding the mango pulp and the SG has gone up by 10 to 1.020 but i don't expect that will all be fermentable sugar. I'm guessing the final ABV to be around the 4.5% mark

Beer starting Original Gravity 1.038 + Mango Pulp at 0.010 = Combined Original Gravity: 1.048 giving a ABV of 4.99% less the unfermentable sugars.

Sunday 23 April 2017

Fermenting : Coopers Gir Kesar (Mango Lager)

The Coopers Gir Kesar (Mango Lager) is brewing after a 4 days in the No-Chill Cube.

I made up a new 1 litre starter with some wort saved from the brewday, from the yeast bank of Safale US-05 as I decanted some into a new vial so I had some better quality yeast banked.

The second vial of yeast looks a lot better than the first on the left. I'm still getting my processes sorted for the Yeast Store and learning as I go.
Still this beer is being fermented using one of the March US-05 vials, just to see if it works.

Ended up with 20 litres into the fermenter at 1.038 SG and after 12 hours or so, we have fermentation taking place, the beer should be around 3.5% approx before adding in the Mango Pulp. Adding a full 850g can of pulp will add about 170g of fermentable sugar so that will not increase the final ABV all that much, which is what I am after, a light fruity summer beer, still not sure if I'll add one or both tins of Mango yet. The current plan is to let the yeast ferment the wort into beer, taste, add one tin of mango, re-taste, leave to ferment out, taste again, then maybe add the other tin.

Wednesday 19 April 2017

BrewDay : Coopers Gir Kesar (No-Chill)

Tuesday 18 April 2017

Allotment : The Hop Poles are up!!!

Managed to get down to the allotment to get the hop poles up today, one string per hop again this year. The Target,Challenger and Fuggles are all doing well, but the Goldings has only just broken the ground.

The Broad Beans are doing okay, so they got a watering, and the greenhouse got a weed and a tidy up ready for the chillies to go into them when the frosty nights have left us.


Didn't have a lot of time to do much more, but things are looking better down there now.