Marble Red Ale

One of the best beers I've ever brewed was my version of Jamil Zainasheff's Evil Twin (blog post here). There's something magical about so much malt and hop character coming together. I was toying with the idea of re-brewing it, but just for fun I decided instead to try my first recipe from the recent book "For the love of hops" by Stan Hieronymus.

The recipe is for "Marble Red Ale". I should mention that I have never tried a Marble brewery beer, nor heard of them outside of this book, but the recipe would seem to add up to a pretty awesome beer, so I had to try it out.

If you look through my older posts you will see that I have a few different possible brewing configurations, from pretty simple pot on a heat source BIAB  with no chilling, right up to recirculating automated step mashing, sparging and full chilling. Generally the higher the OG, the more complex my setup, so for this 1.065 monster I sparged and chilled. I also upped my volume a little to 24L to account for extra losses to hop material.

For yeast, I cultured up a large stirred starter of WYeast PACMAN, which I kept from a smack pack from late last year. Pacman is now my favourite yeast for American ales. I feel that it gives a really nice mouthfeel that I don't get from other american ale yeasts. Also it really is a beast and gets through high OG worts very quickly.

Here's the recipe:

Grain/Extract/Sugar

   %     Amount     Name                          Origin        Potential SRM
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 75.0     5.14 kg.  Pale Ale Malt (2-row)         Australia      1.037      2
 10.0     0.69 kg.  Vienna Malt                   Germany        1.036      4
 10.0     0.69 kg.  Crystal 77L                   UK             1.035     75
  5.0     0.34 kg.  Crystal 120L                  UK             1.033    120

Potential represented as SG per pound per gallon.


Hops

   Amount     Name                              Form    Alpha  IBU  Boil Time
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
 20.27 g.     Columbus                          Pellet  15.00  38.7  60 min.
 11.73 g.     Citra                             Pellet  11.50   3.4  10 min.
 11.73 g.     Simcoe                            Pellet  13.00   3.9  10 min.
 23.47 g.     Cascade                           Pellet   5.75   3.4  10 min.
 48.00 g.     Cascade                           Pellet   5.75   0.0  0 min.
 90.67 g.     Cascade                           Pellet   5.75   0.0  Dry Hop
 13.87 g.     Simcoe                            Pellet  13.00   0.0  Dry Hop
 13.87 g.     Citra                             Pellet  11.50   0.0  Dry Hop


Yeast
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Pacman