Welcome!

 Hello Folks,

Hope everyone is well. I'm Dave and the grand plan here is for me to write down some musings on my home brewing, hence the near perfect pun of Dave's Brewsings. Although on re-reading it may give the impression of the blog being about some kind of middle England fight club as well. I did toy with Dave's Brewtality as a title as well and I'm not certain I've made the best (or least worst perhaps) decision. 

Other than homebrew, there may be some diversions by way of the following:

- Heavy Metal

- Cricket

- Rugby

- Running

- My kids being either total legends / absolute nightmares or somewhere in between

But you'll be thrilled to hear the main crux of the blog will be about my attempts to brew beer. I'm not particularly well up on the science behind it all but I've cobbled together a fairly basic system that churns out all-grain brews of middling to decent quality, with the occasional shocker thrown in for good measure.

Quick run down of the system:

Klarstein 30L mash kettle that occasionally gives me electric shocks and is tough to clean 

That's pretty much it!

Rough brew routine (Brewtine! Seems there are no end to the puns today) is:

- heat the mash water

- add the grain (in a mesh sack)

- mash

- Dispense into a fermenting vessel while sparging using pans of water warmed up on the hob

- Take the sack out 

- Pour the wort back into the kettle

- boil, hops etc

- Dispense into a (sanitised) FV 

- Cool outside overnight (told you it was basic)

- Pitch yeast

- Dry hop if needed

- Re-rack if I can be arsed

- Bottle

- enjoy/howl at the sky for the misfortune of making a duff batch

It is pretty basic but it generally works as long as everything is clean; several times I've considered and got close to buying more equipment (mainly thinking about a Grainfather or similar), even getting sign off from Mrs Dave to spend the cash, only to decide that the system isn't broken and not buying anything. 

Anyway, the plan is to write up my brewdays, mostly for my own reference but if anyone does read this and have any advice / general chat to offer it would be much appreciated!

I did a brew yesterday so I'll write that up shortly. 

Cheers

Dave