Hopped up American Pale Ale

The weather here has been pretty unforgiving over the past two weeks, with little sign of relief. We've hit 35C most days, but it's the warm nights that are hardest to take, with temperatures often up at 30C at 11pm.

At times like these the only beer that seems to sate my thirst is a hoppy american pale. I've found myself craving it a lot, so I decided to brew one on Saturday. Of course by the time it's ready it'll probably be 10C and rainy.

Back last year I made the first American Pale Ale from Jamil Zainasheff's "Brewing Classic Styles" book. That proved to be quite a good beer, but was probably lacking a little in the late hopping for my tastes. The grain bill here is exactly the same as for my first attempt, the late hops have been bumped up quite a bit, doubled in the case of the flame out addition.

The most exciting thing about the brew day was my new gas burner. It's what the aussie's call an "Italian Spiral", and I bought a high pressure regulator with it. My strike water was up to mash temperature within about 10 minutes, and later on I got from mash out to boil in about 10 minutes too. The power of this thing is quite incredible, and it should shave about an hour off my brew day. The only issue is trying to keep the boil under control. Also I came pretty close to a boil over despite plenty of headspace.

I decided to change the mash schedule for this beer, just for fun really. I did the following:

55C for 10 minutes
65C for 45 minutes
72C for 15 minutes
78C for 15 minutes.

I can ramp up slightly faster than 1C per minute. Here's a picture of the mashing setup, organised chaos again I'm afraid:

I have to say I had a lot of fun brewing on Saturday. I managed to have pretty much the whole day free so was quite relaxed. I was so relaxed that I forgot to close the tap on my fermenting vessel when filling it from the chiller and lost about 2 litres of wort down the drain. I'll be at least a litre short when it comes time to fill a keg with this.

For yeast I chose Wyeast Pacman. I had a split from a pack I opened in September, so I carefully stepped it up and pitched the yeast from a stirred 1L starter to this batch, also saving a small sample for a future batch. SG was 1.055, and the fermenting chamber is set to 18C. My efficiency to fermenter wasn't great here. I lost 2 litres down the drain, and at least 4L to trub. I really need to have a think about how to deal with trub when there's a big hop bill. It might be as simple as bumping up the final volume to account for it, but the engineer in me rejects that idea. I'll figure something out.

 

Recipe Specifics

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Batch Size (L):          22.50    Wort Size (L):     22.50

Total Grain (kg):         5.98

Anticipated OG:          1.057    Plato:             14.11

Anticipated SRM:           6.8

Anticipated IBU:          41.0

Brewhouse Efficiency:       70 %

Wort Boil Time:             60    Minutes

Pre-Boil Amounts

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Evaporation Rate:      15.00    Percent Per Hour

Pre-Boil Wort Size:   26.47    L

Pre-Boil Gravity:      1.049    SG          12.08  Plato

Grain/Extract/Sugar

   %     Amount     Name                          Origin       --------------------------------------------------------------

 84.8     5.07 kg. Joe White Pale Ale Malt (2-row)        

  3.8     0.23 kg. Joe White Wheat Malt                   

  5.7     0.34 kg. Breiss Victory Malt                           

  5.7     0.34 kg. Joe White Munich Malt I                

Hops

   Amount     Name                   Form    Alpha  IBU  BoilTime

------------------------------------------------------------------

 20.00 g.     Nugget                 Pellet  12.10  34.1  60 min.

 20.00 g.     Cascade                Pellet   5.75   3.4  10 min.

 20.00 g.     Centennial             Pellet  10.50   5.0  10 min.

 30.00 g.     Cascade                Pellet   5.75   0.0  0 min.

 30.00 g.     Centennial             Pellet  10.50   0.0  0 min.

Yeast

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WYeast PACMAN

A Special Bitter

My first brew of 2013 proved to be a disaster, with my element blowing at the first hop addition. The situation was rescued (again), by ripping off the insulation and bringing the pot inside onto our cook top, which luckily has a high powered gas ring.

This is the third time I've blown one of these elements, and I'm done with them. I'll be purchasing a gas burner as soon as I can get my hands on one. I'm finding it harder and harder to find the time to brew, so anything which interrupts a brew session really hurts.

Anyway, the recipe is a new one, though familiar looking in some ways. It's a special bitter from perfectpint.blogspot.com . Apart from a sub of Willamette for Fuggles, my recipe is identical, yeast included. To get the hard water profile required I needed 2.5tsp gypsum, 1tsp Epsom salts and 0.75tsp Calcium chloride.

I had planned to chill this one on the plate chiller, but having to bring the pot inside was quite enough lugging around for one day, so I didn't lug it back out to do the chilling, I just no-chilled in a cube after the 15 minute hop addition (which became a flame out addition). I saved 2L of wort in an Erlenmyer flask and when pitching the yeast 2 days later (a 1L starter of WLP006), I boiled this 2L, turned off the flame and steeped the Styrians in it for 10 minutes before adding it to the main batch. This is a method from AussieHomeBrewer that I've tried before with limited success, but I was a bit stuck for ideas on Saturday so I'm trying again.

With the decision to change to gas comes another decision - do I double up on batch volume? I haven't decided yet about this. I'm usually quite sorry to see the end of a batch, and there are a lot of people about who drink my beer (I actually didn't get to taste a recent batch it disappeared so quickly). At the moment I'm inclined to do it, but that could change.