5 brown.

One of the ducks succumbed to a predator overnight. In addition the bait was missing from the trap. New bait in trap tonight. I'm pretty unhappy about the predation that has happened in the past week. 3 birds lost.

I will edit the first post when I have the true o.g. for the ESB. My recipe gave estimated o.g. - not from a recipe book... there is some learning to do as I've changed my mash set up - I had been using a 5 gallon pot for a mashtun, then duming the hot mash into a 5 gallon bay marie pan that I had hundreds of 1/8 inch holes drilled in the bottom. Bay marie pan sat in a 7 gallon plastic tub with a spigot. New mashtun is a 10 gallon water cooler with a perforated false bottom and a ball lock valve fed from below the false bottom. My estimations of sugar conversion are going to need some revision... I appear to not be getting as good a conversion as previous method. Some of that may be that the malt was crushed back in June, but I've used old malt before with the previous setup and don't see a strong correlation with conversion efficiency.

Will also give the hops alpha acid level. I generally do not calculate IBU or HBU from this info, but there are certainly calculators out there for those interested... I just go with experience and an idea of what I'm after. Since I've been brewing over 30 years, all grain for over 14 years... well I've got some idea what I'm doing.

Racking the wit beer (Zot d'Amour wit) Saturday. Will keg ginger porter and imperial stout then as well.