Blackacre Special Bitter

Today I brewed up my second attempt at an ESB. My first was the ill-fated Mulligan ESB, batch no. 5. This time I used a blend of crystal malts rather than just crystal 120°, plus I altered the recipe to use an earthier English-inspired hop variety and put a lot less emphasis on aroma hop additions. On top of that, there are the myriad small improvements in my system since way back in August '09.

The Recipe:

9 lb 2-row pale malt
1 lb Cara-Munich
1 lb Crystal 60°

10 AAU (62g @ 4.5% AA) Willamette @ 60
4 AAU (25g @ 4.5% AA) Willamette @ 15

Whirlfloc tablet @ 15 min

Wyeast 1968 - London ESB

Mashed at 154° for an hour using 13.5 quarts of water. Batch-sparged using 160-185° water and collected 6.5 gallons for the boil.

O.G.: 1.053
Est. IBU: 47.7

Brewing was entirely uneventful, which was nice. Today I brewed in the afternoon, starting at about 2 PM, rather than my more typical 7 or 8 AM start time. All in all, I think I still prefer brewing in the morning.

For this brew, I repitched the yeast collected from batch #35 a week ago. The slurry was pretty thick, so after accounting for the globs of yeast stuck to the funnel, I probably got about 180mL of cake in there. I still have a bunch of yeast left, so I think I'm going to hold onto it for another week and do something else with 1968 next.

And in other news, yesterday I built a wooden caddy to carry 3 growlers at a time. Its main purpose is to prevent the growlers from slamming around and tipping over in my car when I take beer places; the caddy also allows me to transport beer in the trunk rather than the cabin of the car. All the wood and stuff was leftover from the kegerator project (I had some 1x6 pine boards I never ended up using), and although the woodwork looks like it was done by a spastic 9-year-old, it is pleasingly functional.