Yesterday’s brew, Brown Dog Stout, is now in the fermenter and making friends with the activated yeast. I took a gravity measurement and it looks like I nailed the target of 1.050. For the small batch, stove top brewing I am doing, a shorter mash time seems to be sufficient. The trick is to keep some of the water back from the mash and use it for “sparging”.

With this brew, I had 2l of water on hand beyond the 10l I used for the mash. Once I had squeezed out most of the liquid from the grains in the brew bag (adding that to the wort, which I was bringing to the boil), I heated a litre at a time in the kettle and rinsed the grains. By doing this, you extract sugars which otherwise would get lost and that is how the gravity (the density of the wort compared to pure water at 1.000) is increased.

The next step is to wait for a week or two and then I can draw off a small sample and see if the brew is sitting somewhere near the target gravity (1.013) for a couple of days in a row.