The plan was to make a strong, all malt wort (the sweet liquid that ferments in to beer), so no sugar was added. The method involves mashing twice and boiling twice, the second boil would be a small beer, which would ensure there wasn’t to much wasted extract. The first mash produced two lots of wort, the first 3.5 barrels (a barrel is 36 gallon) of wort had a gravity reading of 1063 which if fermented as it was would have produced a strong beer of between 6.5 and 7% abv. The second 3.5 barrels of wort had a gravity of 1035, we saved this to sparge the second mash.
Stef from Thornbridge does the heavy lifting
Once we had collected all the wort from the first mash it was time to get ready for the second mash. This involved heating the first wort to mashing temperature and mashing another 175kg in to the mash tun.
Once the second mash had stood for one hour we were ready to start collecting the strong wort this ran in to the underback (a small holding tank that feeds the main wort pump) the smell was amazing and it tasted like honey.
The first gravity reading was 1120 and peaked at around 1127. At this point we started sparging, this normally involves spraying the top of the mash with hot water which washes all the sugary sweet fermentables from the grain. But today the second mash was sparged with the second wort from the first mash, this maximized the strength. Then after we had collected 3.75 barrels of strong wort we began sparging with hot water and collecting the second wort from the second mash. This became the the small beer which we later boiled with 1kg of Sonnet (3.3% alpha acid) hops with an extra 2kg added at the end of the boil.
But before that we boiled the strong wort with 2kg of Summit hops (17.1% alpha acid) this would give us a theoretical bitterness of 170 IBU’s. We boiled for one hour then added 1kg of Centennial hops then five minutes later added 2kg of Cascade and boil for a further five minutes before turning the heat off and allowing the hops to stew. This wort was then cooled and pumped to the fermenting vessel, we had just under three barrels of wort with a gravity of 1117. We then added half a barrel of hot water to the hops which were left in the brew kettle and let it stew again soaking all the remaining sweetness, bitterness and flavor from the hops we then pumped this last bit of wort in to the fermenting vessel giving us a final gravity reading of 1110.
It was a very long day but well worth it and I can’t wait to taste the finished beer. But I’ve got to wait a while first because this HPA28° will be sitting in a tank in the cellar for four months, when it will be bottled in 750ml swing tops. There should be around 600 bottles available from October onwards. The bottles will be available from Beer Ritz, The Hillsborough Hotel and MyBreweryTap.com so far.
I’m thinking about having a special release day, what do you think?
