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

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 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