To celebrate the silly season, leaving my job and regaining some sanity and the situation in general - I bought myself a present. Heh, any excuse would do - but in any case, I am now the proud owner of a Still Spirits Turbo 500 Still…
Isn’t she pretty? I think she is. I’ve had a serious brewing hard-on for this piece of kit for at least the last six months now… now I’ve got to come through with the goods, so while the weather is good and I have some time off between jobs - it’s brewing season!
So today I kicked off the Inaugural 100L wash. The batch is just a larger scale of my typical 25L dextrose wash (6kg dextrose, 21L water, EC1118 Yeast). However given the hotter weather and the brew store’s lack of EC1118 for this quantity - I’m running with a Still Spirits Heat Wave Turbo.
I’m not a big fan of Turbo Yeast, and I’ve never really been afraid to say as much. However, given the improvements I’ve been making to my process, the heat factor here (this week the days are running up to 40+ degrees) and that I now have a quality still to work with - I’m willing to give it a go.
The original recipe was pretty straightforwards: 24kg Dextrose, 84L Water, 4 Sachets of Heat Wave Turbo Yeast. This should have yielded an OG of 1.093. After putting the wash together, it was 24kg Dextrose to 75L Water with an OG of 1.095 (ignore what’s on my silly whiteboard in the photo). I put the difference down to the calculator I was using, which isn’t really based around dextrose.
Anyway, at 2PM I pitched in the four sachets of Heat Wave Yeast into the wash which was at 37.2 deg. It’s currently doing it’s thing and should be done in about 3-4 days, I’ll keep tabs on its progress and keep things documented.
From the yeast specs, I should expect to get just under 12% (or 12L of ethanol) in the final product. Not sure what to percentages I’ll expect to pull off on my still, it touts ~93% average, but we will see.
In other news, I received a wine rack for Christmas which has been a huge help organising the area near my desk, which has been cluttered with wine bottles:
Yummy, now I just need to “clear” some space for future purchases. In the meantime however, I’ll keep this page up to date with my brewing exploits…