Mugwort Gruit Brewday
Experimental holiday brewday. Trying at a half batch but the 6L of dead space in the bottom of the Brewzilla makes that very difficult. I seem to be on track though with losses. The reason for the half batch is mainly because I wanted to brew and I'm a bit short on bottles. 😆 Also using up some spare grain so apart from picking up a bag of Oats this hasn't cost me anything. So what am I doing? Well it's a sort of Sahti inspired Mugwort Gruit. Kind of farmhouse Scandinavian meets Medieval England with 23.2% Rolled Oats, 16.5% Pale Wheat, 12.2% Toasted Malted Oats, 11.6% Torrified Wheat, 11% Floor Malted Pilsner, 9.3% Cars Gold, 8.1% Golden Promise and 8.1% Honey for the end of the boil. I've also added in 8g of crushed Juniper berries to the mash. It was a bit of a battle getting the volume ratios right especially with such a sticky mash. 200g of oat husks didn't really help but I got there in the end. With a short 45min boil with 10g of First Gold Hops, adding 25g of Mugwort at flame out to steep for 10 minutes, then the honey in once the temperature has dropped a bit. I'm going to ferment it with the Wild Yeast I've been building up from a Barley ear. It's been a little slow to ferment but has a pleasant tangy flavour currently. As it's a smaller batch I should get away with using my first capture jar without building it up further.
OG was 1.057 and after 10 days it was done at 1.012, so pretty good for another wild yeast. It’s just in cold crash at the moment so shouldn’t be too long until I can judge if I should have made a full batch or not, lol.
