Kicking off the John Bull Masterclass Irish Stout

Having finally bottled the Light, I can get this Stout going. I wanted to do a stout to start giving me a real choice of ale types in the future. I chose this one as I read that it was the closest stout kit to Guinness. I doubt it will come out anything like it, but much to the missus's annoyance, I still went for this over the Chocolate Stout (She doesn't even like stout, but it has the word Chocolate in the name ;-) ). Phil (see my blogroll) has just bottled his attempt at the same brew, so it will be interesting to see how ours compare.



As soon as I finished bottling the Light I emptied the bucket, scrubbed off the obvious dirt and then filled it with sanitising solution. After rinsing it out with cold water I poured in the wort from the tin and added two 1.7 litre kettles of hot water to it (which now that I do the maths is considerably more than the 2.5 litres I was supposed to add, but I can't imagine that matters greatly.) I also used a little of the hot water to rinse out the tin as best I could without making a complete mess. With freshly boiled water, it dissolved fairly quickly. I then went about filling up the rest of the bucket with cold water. I did this by continually filling a jug with water from the tap on the assumption that this brew, like the others, requires the wort to be aerated well. This aerates the water as it fills the jug, and then I also poured the water in quickly and from a height.

When the bucket was almost full, I measured the temperature to check it was between 21 and 16 degrees as instructed. It was 20 degrees, so I continued filling it with cold water. However, I did slightly overfill it, but hopefully this won't dilute the stout too much, and also, hopefully it won't foam over the side during the initial fermentation. I followed the extremely brief instructions by sprinkling the yeast on top and stirring it in. I was worried this might caught lumps as happened with the IPA when I just sprinkled in the yeast, and although there were initially some small lumps, these seemed to break up after a good stir.

Finally, I gently rested the lid on the bucket and placed it in the brewery. I'm really looking forward to seeing how this comes out. It already looks good :-)