JCBrewing

This weekend, in celebration of brewing for a year, I recreated my first beer- What was supposed to be a Cincinnati Pale ale, but due to me misreading the recipe and brewing too hot, ended up being much closer to a saison than a pale ale.

Ingredients:

1 4lb can of Alexanders pale liquid malt extract.

1 lb briess dry pale malt extract (not in original recipe, but wanted to give a bit of an ABV boost as my last was only ~3%.

1 oz nugget hops, 60 min.

.5 oz cascade, 30 min.

.5 oz cascade, 15 min.

13g Coopers dry ale yeast.

The process was standard though upgraded from the last time I made this brew- I rehydrated the yeast and had a lot of action there. I used my wort chiller, and hopefully during transferring I won’t have any oxidation problems. OG was about 1.037

I decided to try a Red Rye Pale Ale after trying Founders version and loving it about a month ago. After looking for recipe’s online, I didn’t see anything that looked all that good, so I decided to try midwest’s kit. Much to my surprise, it was an extract kit. This was nice as it made for a short brew day. Everything went smoothly, the smaller boil and lack of mash made the brew only take about 3.5 hours from start to finish. The only potential issue was that I had a smack pack, and only gave it about an hour and a half to get going.

Ingredients:

6 lb. Gold liquid malt extract,

2 oz. Chocolate Rye,

3 oz. Crystal Rye,

3 oz. Crystal 50-60,

4 oz. Rye malt,

4 oz. Flaked Rye,

Hops:

2 oz. Columbus pellet hops,

1.5 oz. Centennial pellet hops

Hop schedule:

60min- .5 oz columbus

20 min- .5 oz columbus, .5 oz centennial

10 min- .5 oz columbus, .5 oz centennial

5 min- .5 oz columbus, .5 oz centennial

Yeast- Wyeast ringwood ale (?)

Gravity was around 1.050.

FG was about 1.010, for an abv of 5.25%

I was interested in seeing how I have progressed in skill over the past year, so I wanted to make what is often people’s first brew- Caribou Slobber by Northern Brewer.

Recipe as folows:

9lb Rahr 2-row pale

.75 lbs Briess Caramel 60L

.5 lbs Briess Caramel 80L

.25 lbs Fawcett Pale Chocolate

.125 lbs English Black Malt

Hops:

1 oz US Goldings- 6omin

1 oz Liberty 3o min

1 oz williamette 15 min

Yeast:

Danstar Windsor Ale Yeast

I haven’t been hitting my hitting my gravity very well, so I did a 90 minute mashout, which didn’t seem to help much as I missed the target by .02, with an OG of 1.050. Everything else went normally,  I did get to use my immersion chiller for the first time, and it worked wonderfully- the beer cooled down to pitching temps in about 8 minutes.

Bottled this on April 20, I had a few issues with potential oxidation during transferring as my siphon clip slipped. A bunch of trub also made it into the bottling bucket. Hopefully it won’t have too much impact in the end. I measured my final gravity AFTER adding the bottling sugar, and it was 1.010. So this is somewhere around 5.2-5.5% abv.

I was looking for hard stats on how long it will take me to cool my wort, and came across a great article in the Zymurgy archives (How long will it take to chill your wort, Bible; sep/oct 2004) that gives precise formulas using the length of copper, boil size, tap temps, and other parameters to determine exactly how long it will take to cool your wort with a counter flow chiller. Unfortunately I could not find a comparable article for an immersion chiller, though really you will only need to adjust the system performance coefficient to do so.

Anyway, I made an excel sheet out of it, and will leave it here.CounterFlowChillerStats

Link to zymurgy issue: http://digital.ipcprintservices.com/publication/?i=126492

Today was a longish brew day, but I have gotten a lot better at bottling+ brewing at the same time.

I bottled my SNPA today. I am a bit concerned, because the temperature in the fermentor was at 61 degrees, despite the thermostat in the room being set to 66. So I took it out of the closet, and left it in our main room, and thankfully the temps in the fermentor rose to between 66 and 70. And things started bubbling away, which is good. However, they wouldn’t stop bubbling, and I waited an extra two days to bottle. Thank goodness for the long weekend. It seemed to have stopped actively bubbling this morning, but I still feel like fermentation wasn’t entirely complete. I went a little light on the bottling sugar to hopefully compensate.

The next brew was my first entirely homemade creation- a Maris Otter/Citra Smash.

Recipe is as follows:

10.25 lbs Maris Otter (ordered 10, but the bag looked small, but I put it on a scale and they actually threw in an extra 1/4 lb.

3 oz citra hops. 60/15/0 additions of 1 oz each.

Safale US-05 California Ale yeast.

This brew went pretty steady. I mashed in at 154, temps fell to around 146, a little high. I kept the burner on the lowest setting, and it held temps really well the whole time. I ended up mashing for 90 minutes, with a 10 minute mashout at 170. One interesting thing that happened today was that I got a real roiling boil- its usually quite weak. I guess that’s a good thing.

Today I brewed a Sierra Nevada Pale Ale clone from midwest.

Ingredients:

9lb American 2-row

8 0z Caramel 10L

8 oz Carapils

1 oz perle hops (60 min)

1 oz perle hops (30 min)

2 oz cascade hops (2 mins)

Yeast: White Labs WLP001 California Ale yeast

The brew was pretty typical, My initial mash temp was 162 which hit my 152 mash temp right on the nose after putting the grain in. Temps stayed pretty controlled- I just have to keep my burner on the lowest setting and the temps stay constant. I did a 75 minute mash, then a 10 minute 160 degree mash out. I then brought to a boil as usual. My tap water is running at 47 degrees this time of year, so I didn’t bother throwing ice in the sink to cool the wort down, I just drained the sink and refilled it 4 times after the water had warmed up a bit. I also didn’t obsessively stir the cooling water or wort- it was better this way, less stress, less work, and not much time difference.

Gravity came in at 1.45 or so, right within the 1.42-1.46 range- I didn’t miss on the gravity this time! Final gravity  target is 1.014-1.018.  I did a yeast started, but only the night before.

SNPA is one of my favorite beers, so I am looking forward to cracking open a bottle of this!

I just purchased the ingredients for my next planned beer- an Irish Red Ale! I have made one of these before, and really enjoyed it, so I want to see how I can do when I completely take the training wheels off and brew straight from a recipe.

Recipe sourced from: http://www.beersmith.com/Recipes2/recipe_266.htm

Summarized here:

An interesting note here is that purchasing ingredients was considerably more expensive than buying a kit ($33 vs $25). A lot of this was due to the recipe- The minimum qty I could buy of even specialty grains was a pound, when in some cases only half or .12 lbs were called for! There is also a ton more grain used here- about 12lbs total vs 7.5 on the NB kit.

This week, I am brewing a Spiced Winter Ale from Northern Brewer. My first time spicing a beer, we will see how this works out. This went a bit longer than usual, as I forgot to set the alarm on my thermostat, and the kettle reached 175 degrees when I checked on it. It took awhile to cool down to 160, which is when I inserted the grain.

Ingredients:

9 lb British Golden Promise

1 lb English Medium Crystal Malt.

.5 oz “Mulling spices” unfortunately no detail given.

Hops; .75 oz US Goldings – 60 min

Yeast- Safale US-04 (64-75)

I used about 2/3 of the mulling spices, and pitched down around 70 degrees. I did a full boil of around 6.5 gallons. I also did a “sparge” in a large tupper wear container, rinsing the spent hot grains until the juices ran mostly clear. OG was 1.044, a bit off the target of 1.047

I made spent grains from dog treats again. Recipe modified a bit from Homebrew talk:

6 cups spent grain

3 cups flour

3 eggs

1 cup of peanut butter.

I dumped everything into a kitchen aid mixer bowl, let it stir for about a minute, then pressed the mix down onto a baking sheet. I put some plastic wrap on top to prevent my hands from getting filthy and let me work the mix into a flat sheet. I scored into small squares before putting in the oven at 350 for a half hour. After a half hour, I took the biscuits apart and separated them, then put them back in the oven for 2 hours at 225 to dry them out. They came out better this time, and were much easier to pull off the baking sheet. Riley of course loves them!

I brewed a Northern Brewer kit today- a Saint Paul Porter. Ingredients

8.5 lbs of Rahr Pale 2-row

1 lb English Medium Crystal

.5 lb English Chocolate Malt

1.5 oz of Cluster hops (60 min)

1 oz Cascade (1 min)

Safale US-05 ale yeast.

This brew was pretty uneventful. I heated 5 gals of water t0 154 degrees. Temps dropped to 151, just a degree off my target of 151. I was able to keep temps quite stable throughout the hour long mash. I did a 10 minute mashout. at 170 degrees.I let the grain drain out as long as I could hold the bag up, but then I tried something new- doing a dunk sparge of sorts in the bottling bucket. I just dumped the grain in there, and let the faucet run over the top. This yielded a lot more wort. I think I should have added more water initially, as I missed my target OG by .008- it came in at 1.044 instead of 1.052. I then brought to a boil and continued with the hop schedule.

This week I just cooled in the sink, as my freezer was too full to fit a zip lock bag of water in to freeze. Faucet temps are running around 70 degrees now, down 10 degrees from summer’s peak of 80, so it wasn’t quite as necessary.  I pitched the yeast directly on top of the wort and aerated as usual.

Final OG came out to 1.010 for a final ABV of 4.46%