Drishane Brewery: Happy Dog Series, Wagging Tail Ale

Hey Folks, Welcome back.

This blog post is about my very first all-grain beer and the first in a series of beers from the Drishane Brewery, the series is called "Happy Dog" (just in case you couldn't tell from the title). the series is inspired by my next door neighbours dog who last week quickly drank my last beer on a sunny afternoon, worse again it did this while i was busy inside getting a ball to throw for it. one pint of paulaner later and that was one happy dog :).

Wagging Tail Ale is a relatively simple ale and it all begins with the mash, my grist consisted of:

4.5kg of Maris Otter

0.5kg of medium Crystal

these grains were mashed into 14 Litres of water @ 72 Degrees C which left me with @ 67 Degrees C, it was a single infusion mash which lasted for 60 Min, after this i sparged with 9 litres of water @ approx 75 Degrees C.

I was left with a pre boil gravity of 1.050

i was plagued by stuck mashes and sparges because of the bad design of the manifold in my mash tun.

then the boiling began.

it was a 60 Min boil with 4 separate hop additions these were:

28g of Centennial 10.4% @60 Min

16g of Centennial 10.4% @45 Min

50g of Spalt select pellets 1.5% @10 Min

50g of Spalt select pellets 1.5% @5 Min

after a very vigorous boil i ended up with Approx 19 Litres of Wort and a gravity of 1.059

this wort was fermented with Safale S04 Yeast for four weeks and ended up with a gravity of 1.012

I Bottled this with ordinary Household sugar (104g) and ended up with 31 500ml bottles of beer, much of this loss of volume is down to not using hop socks and having to leave beer behind in each vessel to avoid having hops in my bottles (a rookie mistake)

I'm really hoping that this will turn out well and hopefully it will be well received by my long suffering Guinea pigs, i mean esteemed beer tasters (the lads).

thanks for reading my post

CHEERS