We 'd planned to do 2 days brewing but we'd reckoned without the "Beast from the East" followed by Storm Emma... it snowed, a lot for South Wales, and so Gazza was in the position of having to decide whether to abandon both brewdays with Gav unable to get in, or going for a solo brew!
A lot of brewers will wonder what the issue is here as, in most breweries of our size, brewers routinely brew themselves... but they've not seen our kit! Being the Heath Robinson type affair it is, never designed for single brewing with lots of reasons why it's difficult such as the FVs are really hard to clean owing to their shape, so two people are preferable when brewing....
 |
| About to mash in! |
So, Gazza bravely, in the spirit of the gladiators of ancient times, decided to plough on and meet the brew challenge face on ... ! Actually, it wasn't too bad and the various choke points envisaged were surmounted by either a) some clever manipulation of cables/pipes/other stuff, or b) extra time was taken to make sure everything was done and the brew was safely into FV3 albeit a touch cool so needed warming up in order to ferment properly, but hey.... that's a minor point!
This has meant that mashing in single-manned is now defacto for brewdays meaning we can theoretically get finished at a reasonable time!
 |
| Trying to work out how to do the cleaning single-manned.... |
 |
| Fuck it, let's have a cup of rosie next to some hops... |
 |
| Digging the copper |
 |
| I could thus reach the pump control for cleaning the fermenter! |
 |
| Wort flowing through the aerator into FV3 |
No comments:
Post a Comment