Kraken Brewing

Designing the Recipe
This time around, i’m going to be partly designing my own recipe for a coffee stout. This stout is basically going to follow these guidelines:
-ABV between 5% and 7%.
-Grain bill of 80% base malt + remaining specialty grains.
-Between 30 and 40 IBUs from bittering additions of hops, with some at the end of the boil.
-An Ale yeast with an attenuation of approximately 75% (Us-04/05 or wyeast 1056 American Ale)
-A mash between 67c and 69c
-Water chemistry adjusted to add hardness (increased calcium and carbonate)
-2.5 volumes of C02

This time around, I decided to go with a Mango IPA since I love mango and wanted to try making a fruit beer. I now have my Brewzilla 3.1 35L setup and a better, larger fermentation fridge. Hopefully this will up the quality of my homebrew and make the process a lot easier. The Mango is added during fermentation with the hops and left for a week or two.

Mango IPA

Recipe link

Last week, I purchased the Brewzilla 3.1 35L all-in-one brewing system along with a few bits and pieces. I also bought a huge fermentation fridge that should let me control temperature a lot better. My next brewday (Mango IPA) will be the first using this new system after only using BIAB in the past.

For my second attempt at BIAB, after the Stone & Wood replica, I decided to go with a popular NEIPA recipe. The beer is meant to be cloudy orange, with big juicy fruity notes and a nice thickness to it.

This time around, I decided I needed to control the fermentation temperature a little better. I picked up an Inkbird ITC-308 Wifi digital temperature controller and hooked it up to an old bar fridge with a heating element in order to keep the temperature stable. The controller seems to be working very well, it keeps everything at a steady range and allows me to monitor temps from an android app as well as adjust temperatures as need be.

While my mead is fermenting, I decided i’ll make my second ever batch of beer. This time I decided to scale things up to 23L and go with an all grain Pacific Ale BIAB (similar to Stone and Wood). For this I bought a 35L brew pot as well as a 30L plastic fermenter with airlock and thermometer. The specs of the Pacific Ale are as follows:

Date: 24/5/19
Boil Time: 60 min
Batch Size: 20L (fermenter volume)
Boil Size: 25L
Mash: 30L at 66 °C for 60 min
Target OG: 1.046
Target FG: 1.008
Target ABV: 5.05%

After just having completed my first ever beer (IPA), I decided i’d chuck something into the fermenter so something is constantly being brewed and I can get a larger fermenter for other beer batches. I decided to go with mead because it takes a while to ferment, it gets pretty strong, it’s easy to brew and it can be pretty tasty once its fully mellowed out. Specifications:

Date: 8/5/2019
Vessel: Glass Carboy
Batch: 4.5L
Honey: 2kg
OG: 1.135
FG: 1.016
Yeast: Mangrove Jacks Mead Yeast
Target ABV: 14%
Primary fermenter: 1 month
Bottle: 3 months to 1 year