I broke open my first bottle of Tiny Tim today. It is only a couple of weeks since I bottled it but it seems to be fit to drink already. The reason for the impatience is that I’m cooking up another brew today and homebrewing guru Charlie Papazian (The Complete Joy of Homebrewing) gives clear instruction that it is good practice to crack open an earlier brew as part of the process.

I’m not following one of his recipes though but another from Graham Wheeler’s Brew Your Own British Real Ale. This time I’m trying his version of Exmoor Gold, which I’m calling Autumn Gold. I have been brewing to a standard of 1kg of pale malt but since this only uses pale malt that would give me another very short length brew, so I scaled this one to 1.5kg of pale malt.

The malt went into 10.7l of water. The strike temperature was 70°C and I got it down to the target of 66°C as the grain went in but pushed it a bit hard and so it spent rather long patch of the 90 minutes above 70°C. Hopefully I managed to extract enough fermentable sugars! It probably didn’t help that I was also enhancing my webpage that helps me monitor the temperature via my Raspberry Pi; too much time in the code and not enough watching the temperature. It should be easier next time though.

I brought it to a rolling boil, added 16g of Challenger hop pellets and I’m now waiting for ten minutes before the end of the boil to put in 6g of Styrian Goldings and a pinch of Irish Moss. Wheeler uses Goldings instead but they should be close enough to produce good beer; I’m not out to clone the beer precisely. I’ll also put in another 3g of Styrian Goldings post boil (as specified this time) before transferring the wort into my heavy duty plastic jerry can to cool overnight.

Right, time to measure out those last two additions.