Brewday - Windsor Knot IPA

Brewday – Windsor Knot IPA">Brewday – Windsor Knot IPA

Finally we got round to brewing our royal wedding beer today. Fendog came up from the big smoke and the rain held off sufficiently to brew in the back yard, but it still proved an extremely frustrating day. After some thought, we gave up on the idea of doing a honey ale. Given the fact that we hadn’t brewed for a while, and that since the Great Divorce my equipment and supplies are severely limited, we thought we wuold do a dead simple partial grain brew – a variation on our old Padded Jacket recipe, which we will be calling “Windsor Knot IPA”, commemorating not just the forthcoming royal nuptials, but also Fendog’s favourite tie method (I’m a half-windsor fan myself).

So it should have been a simple 2-3 hour job including clean-up, and then off to watch the Six Nations round at a mate’s house. However, it turned into an all-day affair with our faithful old Burco boiler proving not so faithful today and stubbornly refusing to get the wort up to a rolling boil. We had to rush out for parts and then transfer the wort to a different vessel whilst we made mid-brew repairs to the boiler. It did the job and we were able to finish off. Or should I say – I was able to finish off, Fendog having deserted me to watch the rugby round at Stubble’s. Thanks for that Fendog!

Another frustration came when I tried to transfer the wort to the fermenter. You may recall that when we first acquired the urn it was pretty useless because the the tap was completely knackered. Fendog and Spanners had fit a spanking new tap, but because we were using it just to heat water for mashing and not as a HLT, we didn’t fit a hop strainer. This prove problematic today and I had to employ some ingenuity to get round the fact that tap blocked almost immediately. When I get a bit of time, my next project will have be to make and fit a hop strainer.

Anyway, we got there eventually and it was nice to be brewing again. I’m already thinking about what we can brew next to use up some more of the hops taking up all the room in my freezer. We  managed to use up all my East Kent Goldings in this one, as will as the entire crop from the allotment last year, which I flung in for the last last five minutes of boil. He’s the recipe for those of you who are interested (except it doesn’t show the homegrown hops):