The milk stout fermented quickly, so on Friday night it was time to rack it to secondary and chill it. Gravities were 1.022 for the Dry English (a touch too dry for the milk stout, but what can one expect using that yeast?!) and 1.025 for the British. I needed another carboy in order to rack the milk stout, so I also kegged up one of the Hop Wallop carboys. The starters from Thursday were fed again with more malt extract. Saturday we brewed a clone of Fuller’s London Pride, using the no-sparge technique, which is where instead of sparging the mash with the hot liquor to extract more sugars, you start with a bigger mash and run it off once, then add hot liquor directly to the kettle to make up volume. The theory is that you get a better malt profile because there’s less tannin extracted from the grain. It being the first time we’d used this technique, we were concerned we would end with too low of a gravity, so we did top up the mash with extra water before running it off. It turned out that we needn’t have bothered, because we got a gravity of 1.046 when the target was only 1.042. Hops were Northern Brewer, Galena, and Target for bittering, with Northern Brewer late in the boil for aroma.

The cask version of the Sierra Nevada pale ale clone and the firkin of Hardy Country Bitter both emptied this week, so we casked five gallons each of the Hop Wallop and Alpha King clones in corny kegs. Both got three-plus ounces of dry hops, using a surescreen for the Hop Wallop and a grain bag (bigger than a normal hop bag) for the Alpha King.