A brew day in a kitchen with one working hob
A brew day in a flat is mostly a problem of heat and space, and both are settled before the first sack is opened. My kettle holds thirty litres, the hob will bring twenty-four of them to a boil in about fifty minutes, and the rest of the day is arranged around those two numbers.
| Brewed | 21 April 2024 |
|---|---|
| Written up | 9 June 2024 |
| Into the fermenter | 20 litres |
| Mash held at | 67 °C for 60 min |
| Cellar on the day | 11 °C |
| Original gravity | 1.044 |
| Final gravity | 1.010 |
| Strength | 4.5 % by volume |
FG 1.010OG 1.044
Read with a hydrometer at twenty degrees, at the kitchen table, before anything got washed.
01 / 04
The kettle and the hob decide the batch size
Twenty litres into the fermenter is not a round number I chose; it is what one hob and one flat will carry. The kettle holds thirty, which leaves room for the foam at the start of the boil and for the litre or so that goes up the extractor fan every twenty minutes. Fill it higher and the first hot break climbs over the rim onto the burner, where it scorches and fills two floors of the stairwell with a smell that takes days to leave. I arrived at the headroom figure by scrubbing it off the rings.
The hob matters more than the kettle does. Mine needs fifty minutes to take twenty-four litres from mash-out to a rolling boil, and it cannot hold that boil and heat a second pan at the same time. That one fact reorganised the whole day. Sparge water goes into the electric kettle instead, the grain is crushed the night before, and nothing that needs a burner happens between the strike water going on and the flame going out at the end of the hour.
Off the card
- Thirty-litre kettle, twenty-four litres in, twenty out
- Fifty minutes from mash-out to a rolling boil
- Sparge water heated in the electric kettle, off the hob
- Grain crushed the night before, never on the morning
02 / 04
Mashing in a cool box in a cold kitchen
The mash tun is an insulated cool box with a tap fitted through the side, and in an unheated kitchen in March it loses about a degree and a half over the hour. That is tolerable if you know it is happening. I strike two degrees high, stir until the thermometer settles at sixty-six, wrap the box in an old sleeping bag and leave it alone. Lifting the lid to look costs roughly half a degree each time, which is why I stopped looking and started trusting the arithmetic instead.
Where the drift really bites is on a cold morning with a heavy grain bill. In February 2024 I mashed a dark beer with six kilograms of grain, struck at sixty-eight, and found sixty-one an hour later because I had rinsed the box with cold water and never thought about the mass of plastic I was asking the wort to heat. The beer came out thin, dry and perfectly drinkable, and it was not the beer written on the card. Rinsing the box hot takes two minutes and costs nothing at all.
03 / 04
The boil, the window and the stairwell
Sixty minutes of rolling boil in a flat is a negotiation with the room. The extractor fan takes maybe half of what comes off the kettle and the rest finds the cold window and runs down the glass. I open that window two fingers' width even in January and lay a towel along the sill, which sounds primitive and works perfectly well. Without it the damp reaches the wall above the frame inside three brew days, and I have already repainted that corner once.
Hop additions go in on a timer written on the card rather than on a feeling, because an hour beside a kettle is long enough to lose ten minutes without noticing. Bittering at sixty, a small aroma charge at ten, and whatever I am experimenting with at flameout. The neighbours on the landing treat the smell as a kind of weather by now. One of them asks each time whether this is the sort with the bitter finish, which is the only review that reliably reaches me.
04 / 04
Chilling, and the half hour that decides the fortnight
Chilling decides how the following two weeks go. I drop an immersion coil into the kettle and run the cold tap through it: in winter that takes twelve minutes to go from boiling to twenty-two degrees, in July closer to thirty-five, because the tap water itself comes out warmer. Everything that touches wort after flameout has been boiled or has sat in sanitiser — the coil, the spoon, the hydrometer jar, the funnel, the inside of the fermenter lid, and the tap that I forgot about exactly once.
The batch I forgot it on was a summer ale in 2023 that had a sour edge within a week and went down the drain at the allotment. A fermenter tap comes apart into three pieces, and two of those can be rinsed convincingly without ever being separated, which is to say without being cleaned. The tap has its own line on the card now, with a box beside it to tick. The things that ruin beer are boring, quick to prevent, and easy to skip when you are tired.
Off the card
- Coil, spoon, hydrometer jar and funnel sanitised during the boil
- Fermenter tap taken apart every time, never rinsed in place
- Twenty-two degrees before the yeast goes in, whatever the season
- Original gravity read and written down before the lid closes