Firstone Walker Union Jack Clone

Back to the brewing network's "Can You Brew It". I love this show. I managed to get some fresh Union Jack when I was in San Francisco back in October. I remember thinking it was pretty awesome, though I can't remember anything specific about now. I just decided it's time I did a west coast IPA style beer and this recipe looks the goods.

I'm still working on the new setup. Efficiency (63%) was quite poor once again. I think this is coming from two places:

1. My blichman autosparge is returning wort via a silicon hose, which is causing a whirlpooling effect. This is causing an obvious channelling problem. I need to rethink how to return wort and sparge. 
2. I'm collecting wort far too quickly in the sparging process.

I've removed the stainless braid from my kettle output. As I mentioned in the last post it was getting hopelessly clogged with a medium hop bill, it wouldn't have any chance with this hop bill. Also it was interfering with whirlpooling by effectively drawing wort from the whole of the outside rim. Now I've just got a simple pickup tube with no filter of any kind. It worked quite well, with a decent trub cone developing through simple whirlpooling and I was able to drain all but about 2.5L from the kettle without getting a lot of hop debris in the chiller.

So even though my mash efficiency was the same as the last brew, my brewhouse efficiency was way up. I'm half way there I guess. I ended up with an OG of 1.063, 7 points off the CYBI recipe, but only 3 off the recipe in Mitch Steele's IPA book, so I'm hopeful I'll still end up with something pretty good.

I'm a little worried about my starter. It was a 2.5L stirred starter of WLP007. The starter beer had a very slight sour edge, and I was sorely tempted to throw the whole thing out. Then I found this post on homebrewtalk.com, and decided it was probably ok. Now I'm not so sure. I guess we'll find out.

Despite the slight disappointment with mash efficiency, and being another night time brew, the whole thing went really smoothly. I think this was due in large part to creating a job list before hand. I hadn't done this before, but it really helped keep any panic at bay. Here it is:

Recipe:

Firestone Union Jack



Grain/Extract/Sugar

   %     Amount     Name                          Origin        Potential SRM
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
 82.0     6.30 kg.  Pale Ale Malt (2-row)         Australia      1.037      2
 11.7     0.90 kg.  Munich Malt I                 Germany        1.037      6
  4.9     0.38 kg.  CaraPils                      Germany        1.033      2
  1.3     0.10 kg.  CaraMalt                      UK             1.035     34

Potential represented as SG per pound per gallon.


Hops

   Amount     Name                              Form    Alpha  IBU  Boil Time
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
 29.00 g.     Warrior                           Pellet  14.70  55.5  60 min.
 16.00 g.     Cascade                           Pellet   7.90   8.4  30 min.
 21.00 g.     Centennial                        Pellet   9.00  12.5  30 min.
 52.00 g.     Cascade                           Pellet   7.00   0.0  0 min.
 52.00 g.     Centennial                        Pellet  10.50   0.0  0 min.
 44.00 g.     Cascade                           Pellet   5.75   0.0  Dry Hop
 44.00 g.     Centennial                        Pellet  10.50   0.0  Dry Hop
 30.00 g.     Cascade                           Pellet   5.75   0.0  Dry Hop
 30.00 g.     Centennial                        Whole   10.50   0.0  Dry Hop
 14.00 g.     Amarillo Gold                     Pellet  10.00   0.0  Dry Hop
 14.00 g.     Simcoe                            Pellet  13.00   0.0  Dry Hop


Yeast
-----

WLP007 


Mash Schedule
-------------

Mash Type: Multi Step


Saccharification Rest Temp :  63  Time:  60
Mash-out Rest Temp :          68  Time:  10
Sparge Temp :                 78  Time:  30


All temperature measurements are degrees Celsius.

American Pale Ale

So it's back to brewing classic styles for the first beer through my new mash tun. I've dispensed with the bag for now and I'm close to finishing the 3 vessel system I've been building for the last few months.

Progress

The recipe is one I've done several times before, though I've played with the hops a little. The brewday itself was besieged with issues from the off:

1. I connected my heat exchanger backwards during the initial mash, and the wort ended up hitting 69C through the HEX for a short time before I spotted the error and dropped it back to 66C.
2. I ran my sparge water through the HEX to ensure it was at the correct temperature, but once again I connected it backwards and may possibly have heated some sparge water way above an acceptable temperature, also the water in the HEX boiled for a moment which is not good.
3. I didn't heat enough sparge water and ended up topping up the kettle with around 3.5L of water to hit the pre-boil volume. 
4. My hop filter using a stainless braid got completely clogged with pellet hops and I left around 5L of wort in the kettle at the end of the brewday.
5. Efficiency was poor,  around 63%, a combination of mill gap and running out of sparge water.
6. The final insult - I messed up setting the temperature on the fermenting fridge and 12 hours after pitching the yeast it was sitting at 12.5C.

I'm still hopeful it's not a complete disaster, but I'll be lucky to pull some decent beer from this brewday, and in any event I'll be very short on volume.

One nice result from the whole experience was the clarity of the wort at the end. It's unlike anything I've seen before from any other brew setup I've used. Hopefully it translates into clearer beer, though I'm not so sure about that.

 Anyhow, that's the first and hopefully the most painful brew on the new system. You can plan these systems out all you like but you don't really get an idea how it all works together until you fire it up. I now know where I need to concentrate my efforts to get this running smoothly. I need to:

1. Sort out draining of the kettle to the plate chiller. Some ideas below
2. I need to heat more sparge water than seems necessary, better to have too much rather than too little. I was still getting 1.024 from the last runnings out of the mash tun so missed out on a lot of sugar here.
3. I need to tune the mill gap a little. I had no issues with sparging so there seems to be some room for adjustment.
4. I need rules about HEX connections. It matters which way it's connected.
5. I need to mount the controller properly. At the moment it's just sitting on the edge of the stand.

For the kettle draining, I'm going to have to abandon the sparge braid as a hop filter. It just isn't up to the job and it's also having a dramatic effect on my ability to create a whirlpool in the kettle. Because I'm effectively draining the kettle from the whole of the outer rim, the whirlpool has no chance to gain any momentum.

My plan is to replace the braid with a simple side facing pickup tube and simply depend on an effective whirlpool stage to concentrate hop debris away from the pickup tube. I'll need to throttle back the outlet to avoid upsetting the resulting cone of hop debris. Also this means I can't really use the boiling wort towards the end of the boil to sanitise my chiller, so the chiller will have to be sanitised separately. Maybe I'll figure out a clever way to do this, but I can't think of one right now.

Here's the recipe:

5.1Kg Barrett Burston Ale Malt
0.34Kg Weyermann Munich I
0.34Kg Joe White Wheat
0.23Kg Breiss Victory

Water treatment: 2.5tsp CaSO4, 1tsp CaCl2, 1tsp MgSO4, 0.25tsp lactic acid

18g Magnum 14.7% @60
20g Cascade 7.9% @ 10
20g Centennial 9% @10
20g Cascade 7.9% @ 0
20g Centennial 9% @0

Pitched 200ml slurry of WLP001. Fridge set to 19C (or so I thought, dipped to 12.5C but quickly corrected back to 19)

My Continuing Landlord Obsession

So here we go again, Wyeast Yorkshire Ale yeast, Styrian Goldings, Golden Promise, and just a hint of Simpsons Heritage Crystal.

Looks like Timothy Taylor have done quite a bit of updating of their website recently. There are some really good videos with head brewer Peter Eells narrating here.

I particularly like the fermenting vessels - basically they convert from open to closed after the main part of fermentation is finished.

Mmmmmmmm

Recipe:

4.20  Kg Thomas Fawcell Floor Malted Golden Promise
0.175Kg Simpsons Heritage Crystal

34g Fuggles 5% @ 60

23g EKG 5.7%   @15
50g Styrian Goldings 2.5% @ 0

Salts: 1tsp CaCls, 1.5tsp CaSO4, 1tsp MgSO4 (also 1/4 tsp of Lactic)

Mash: In at 55C for 5, 66C for 40, 72C for 10, 78C for 10

Mashing in at 55 seems to have had a dramatic effect on the Amber Ale I brewed last time - hydrometer samples maintained a dense fluffy head for about an hour!

The new system build is still ongoing, and my lack of familiarity with it caused a big cock up last night. I mashed into about 36L of liquor instead of 32. I don't have numbers on the keggle, just marks and I got mixed up. That will need to be fixed.

Mid-mash

This meant that nearly an hour into what became a 2 hour boil I still had over 30L of weak wort and I decided that it was getting too late to do a very extended boil so I chucked in the bittering hops. One hour later I still had around 27L of wort, which is usually my pre-boil volume. At that stage I cut the heat, whirlpooled and added the styrians, and finished with an OG of 1.040. This means efficiency was at around 80%, without changing the crush, which shows you how much more efficient lower gravity brewing is in a brew in a bag system.

I ended up collecting about 23L of wort and could have collected a lot more, but I didn't have the headspace in my fermenter (a Brewtech stainless bucket). I'm planning to aggressively top crop this batch, at 24 hours skim off and throw away, then at 48hr collect a batch of yeast for another brew. For now it just has a cling film lid, which will be replaced when activity reduces a little with the usual stainless lid.

I chilled to groundwater temp (25C), and pitched and aerated straight away as it was getting too late for messing about. Yeast is of course WY1469, and aeration was 60sec O2. The fermenting fridge was set to 17C and I'm allowing it to free rise to 19.


Target OG was 1.045, and this will also affect the IBUs on this beer. Wheeler lists Landlord OG as 1.042, so I'm there or thereabouts. Overall it was only a minor disaster, caused by two factors; night time brewing and lack of keggle number markings/familiarity with the system. On the plus side the extended boil does seem to have darkened the wort a little, which is appropriate for a Landlord clone.

This should still be a decent beer, and I'll put it 'on cask' (Low CO2 through hand pump, ~10C).

Lessons learned: Sort out the keggle markings, no more night time brewing until I've got the system dialled in.

American Amber Ale On New Brewery

I visited the Bright Brewery at Christmas. I tried quite a few of their beers but for me the 'Hellfire Amber Ale' stood out. It has a magnificent malty backbone with just a little spicy hop character over the top. From the notes I read at the brewery it's fermented with 'Yorkshire Ale Yeast' and finished with English hops - I assume this means WY1469 and EKGs.

Anyhow, this got me thinking about brewing something along the same lines, but with a bit of American hop character, just because I'm in the mood for some C hops. I've turned to my trusty copy of 'Brewing Classic Styles' and pulled out the American Amber Ale recipe from that.

 I've been busy building myself a new brew rig over the last few months. To begin with I've built up the stand with a mounting point for my chiller, burner and HEX, which already represents a huge improvement over the improvised mountings on my old rig. Also I've put this on castors, which I can tell you already is by far the biggest improvement over the old rig. Here's what it looked like last week before getting tested over the weekend.

The New Rig

For the first brew (and probably the second) on this rig I'm using BIAB with HERMS similar to the previous system. One change on the new rig is a plumbed whirlpool fitting. Eventually this will morph into a full 3V HERMS system, but it might take me a month or more to get fully there.

Another change is that I've now started buying ingredients in bulk. I've gotten myself a monster mill and 75Kgs of base malt, as well as a few kilos of hops. These are being stored appropriately and already I'm enjoying the feeling of being able to brew whenever I want, whatever I want.

For this brew I set the mill gap to ~1mm. My efficiency ended up at 69%, and this was something I was able to measure accurately for once, as I've calibrated the new keggle. I'll adjust the mill gap down a little to try and get to about 75% which is I think a good place to be efficiency wise.

Mash schedule was: Mash in at 55, raise to 66 for 50 mins, 72 for 20 mins, then mash out at 78 for 20mins. I'm testing out some theories I've read on head retention and low mash in temps. I'll report on this later on.

I was left with 2.5l of wort/trub in the keggle at the end of the brew and I should be able to get this down a little more with some adjustment. I got 20L into the fermenter (also a new SS brew bucket), and this got 60 secs of O2 aeration at pitching time. Yeast was WLP001 from a 1.5L stirred starter.

Recipe:

Water: 2tsp Gypsum, 1tsp CaCl2, 1tsp MgSO4 into 32L very soft Melbourne water.

4.19Kg Barrett Burston Ale Malt
0.45Kg Weyermann Munich Malt
0.34Kg Simpsons Crystal Light
0.23Kg Simpsons Cyrstal Dark
0.23Kg Breiss Victory Malt

Pre-boil: 26L at 1.043

After-boil: 22.5 at 1.051

Hops:

24g Centennial  9.0%AA at 60 mins
 7g  Centennial  9.0%AA at 10 mins
 7g  Cascade     7.9%AA at 10 mins
 7g  Centennial  9.0%AA at  0 mins
 7g  Cascade     7.9%AA at   0 mins 

Whirlpool through chiller from 5 mins before end boil to 5 mins post boil. Chilled to ~75C via whirlpool then to 25C into fermenter. Chilled to 21 in fridge before pitching. Fermentation set at 20C

OG: 1.051

Some tasting

Kolsch II

I tasted this just after a Flensburger Pilsner, so it's interesting to pull out some of the contrasting tastes between a very clean pilsner and a relatively clean tasting kolsch.

Pours with a generous creamy white head, which dissipates and leaves no lacing. Pale coloured, though not quite as pale as the pilsner. Good level of carbonation for the style. Some very slight green apple (possibly acetaldehyde but slightly different I think). Other noticable 'white wine' type flavours. Little to no hop aroma on this one. Bitterness is clean and at an appropriate level for the style. Dry finish.

A good beer, reasonably well brewed. I am very sensitive to acetaldehyde and I think I can possibly detect it here, but only a very tiny amount. I've gotten this with both Kolsch yeasts I've used (WLP029 and WY2568), but with other yeasts any acetaldehyde tends to disappear with time.

I would like to see a better head and lacing on this and some of my other beers. I wonder if no-chilling influences this. I think I've noticed a correlation here, but I need to keep track of things a little better to know for sure.

Kolsch II

Brunswick Pride

This beer is almost simultaneously a triumph and a disaster. With eyes closed it is a really fine example of a drinkable, sessionable english bitter ale. However with eyes open it's a mess. It has a serious haze problem, which cold conditioning has had no effect on.

If you can recall the brewing notes on this one, the grain had been sitting in my garage crushed for 9 months before I got around to using it. A taste test seemed to confirm it was in reasonable condition, but I think it's extremely likely that it's the cause of this haze. I have found a few examples on homebrew forums where brewers found the same haze problem with very old grain. I don't know how to explain this scientifically, but empirically there does appear to be a strong connection.

This is a shame, as usually any beers I ferment with WY1968 are extremely bright. Also I place a lot of importance on having my beer reasonably bright, and this haze is annoying me. Still, it's a really nice beer to drink, so not a total mess.

Got down to an FG of 1.012 on this, so I think the O2 injection at yeast pitching time is having the desired effect. Also this beer was ready to drink (tastewise) a little quicker than I would have expected. I think I'm sold on O2 for aeration.

Dead Guy Clone

This beer had me very confused for a while. Kegged after 3 weeks, I tasted it quite regularly over the following three weeks. It began with some harsh phenolic type notes, little to no hop character, poured with no head, and displayed a slight haze. This changed slowly at first and then rapidly to a beer with beautiful toasty, buiscuity notes and a spicy hop character. The rapid change seemed to coincide with the haze disappearing, so I think perhaps some of the particulate in suspension was causing the phenolic type tastes.

Dead Guy Clone

Dead Guy Clone

Unfortunately, the balance of this beer was off by a little, missing perhaps 10 IBUs of bitterness. Also it would have benefited from a little more late hop character. I can't blame the recipe for this, as the hops I used were lacking in AA% and my attempts to make up for this on the day with some high AA% hops I had stored were unsuccessful. This was probably due to the age of the high AA% hops.

Kolsch (again)

I saved the yeast from my last batch of Kolsch, and given the time of year I though I'd get another one on asap to deal with visitors. This is a beer I don't mind drinking, but not a favourite by any means. All the same, it requires a certain amount of skill to come up with a very pale, clean tasting beer, with no-where to hide in terms of fermentation issues etc.

An early tasting of the previous batch

I decided to change the recipe a little, based on a Jamil recipe from a Kolsch article of his in a 2009 issue of BYO magazine. This is just Pilsner malt and wheat malt in a 95/5 ratio. I had planned to go with Hallertau hops, but my brew shop was all out, so I went with Spalt. This is a hop which many people report as having quite an odd flavour profile. I'm interested to see what it's like in the finished beer.

Mashing was at 65 for 50 mins (recirculated through HEX), then mash out at 75 for 10. I no-chilled this beer. One unusual thing about my brewing setup is that I never measure volumes, just guess based on experience how much water/wort I've got at each point. This has never let me down before, but on this brew I ended up with 22.5L of 1.044 wort instead of 20L of 1.049 (after trub losses). This is actually quite a mess up, and is a bit of a wake up call for me, I need to sort out my volume measurements.

Anyhow, here's the recipe:

4.72KG Joe White Pilsner Malt
0.25KG Joe White Wheat Malt

30g 4.75%AA Spalt hops @50
10g 4.75%AA Spalt hops @10

whirlpooled for 20, then no-chilled.

This will stay in the no-chill cube until the London Pride clone is done fermenting, then I'll pitch some WY2565 slurry to this and ferment at 16 (one degree lower than the last batch). I'll also give it a blast of O2 and try to dry it out a little. The previous batch is not quite dry enough based on early tastings.

Brunswick Pride

I've had a bag of grain ready for brewing for several months, and a smack pack of yeast in the fridge for over a year. Yesterday I decided to put both to work to see if good quality beer can result in such old ingredients.

First off, I had a mix of 95% Simpsons Maris Otter, 5% Simpsons Dark Crystal which was supposed to go into a Fullers ESB type beer. The yeast is a WYeast 1026PC cask ale, manufactured June 2013!

Chewing on the grains I discovered that they still had plenty of crunch with no discernible musty notes. The yeast I smacked and waited about 8 hours until I could see that the pack was beginning to swell. At this point I decided to bank this yeast in glycol stocks. I made a quick post on aussiehomebrewer.com about this.

I was still not too sure about the actual viability of the yeast, so the wort was no-chilled to ensure that it can wait until I either propogate or buy some healthy yeast.

Given the yeast issues, I dumped about 800g of my grains to come up with the following grain bill:

4.67Kg Simpsons Maris Otter
0.25Kg Simpsons Dark Crystal

then very loosely based on a Can You Brew It Fuller's London Pride recipe, the hop bill is as follows:

12g Northdown @60mins
22g East Kent Goldings @60mins

18g Northdown @ 0mins
25g East Kent Goldings @ 0mins

I took 250ml, 700ml and 2L wort samples for stepped starters, and no chilled the rest. The mash was recirculated at 65.5 for 50mins, mash out at 78 for 10. I got pretty good efficiency here - OG of 1.051 for 75%, a little more than I expected.

My yeast adventures began with pitching the 100ml remaining in the 18 month old WYeast pack into 250ml of wort. I watched this for two days but there was no discernible activity. Despite this there was a slight drop in gravity so I decided to pitch this to the 700ml wort flask. After another day or so I had lots of activity in this flask, but this failed to pass the sniff inspection (never mind the taste inspection). It had serious medicinal/phenolic aromas. Either the yeast has mutated severely, or most likely I've got some Brett or something in there. I will try to streak out a few colonies from the frozen stocks to see what I come up with, but this won't be done in time to ferment this batch.

The solution is a fresh smack pack of WY1968 london esb ale yeast. This will be pitched to my 2L starter tonight, followed by pitching to the main batch tomorrow. Fermentation will be at 18C rising to 20 towards the end.

Had I known for sure that the WY1026 was a no-go, I would have mashed a little lower to achieve better attenuation. However, I have just gotten myself a little pure oxygen aeration kit, so 60secs of Oxygen may help to boost yeast health and numbers and achieve a dryer finish. Updates on this fermentation will follow.

Rogue Dead Guy (Can You Brew It)

I recently spent a week in San Francisco where I drank some incredibly good beer. Best of all was Rogue Dead Guy on draught at the Rogue pub.

I had tried some rogue beers here in oz several years ago, but had not been impressed. Like many imported american beers at the time, they had been badly treated and didn't give a realistic impression of the quality of the beer. The situation has improved considerably since then, with chilled shipping being the most important factor.

Anyhow, I just had to have a go at this beer, and I'm trying the 'Can you brew it' recipe. We're looking for quite a high OG here. Not a big deal in a multi-vessel set up, but with brew in a bag this can be tricky. A slightly high mash temperature will also reduce our potential raw wort gravity.

I recirculated this mash for 75 minutes at 67C, then did a mash out at 75C for 20 minutes. A small additional step was to rinse the grains with about 3L of ~75C water after removing the grain bag from the mash vessel. During the boil I kept an eye on the refractometer readings and ended the boil when I got a reading of 17.25ish. This translates to and SG of 1.067 and my hydrometer later confirmed this.

This was chilled and immediately had 22g of rehydrated Safale US-05 pitched to it. Tried to get Pacman, it's my favourite yeast for lots of brews, so it would have been nice to be able to use it for a Rogue clone. Unfortunately there was none to be found. Fermentation is quite vigorous and is taking place at 17C. Can't wait to get this one on tap.

Here's the recipe, I've subbed Saaz for Sterling and added a little nugget to bump up the IBUs to my desired level (~45):

Grain/Extract/Sugar

   %     Amount     Name                          Origin        Potential SRM
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
 67.4     5.14 kg.  Pale Ale Malt (2-row)         Australia      1.037      2
 22.8     1.74 kg.  Munich Malt (Bolander)        USA            1.036     10
  9.8     0.75 kg.  Simpsons Crystal Pale                 UK             1.035     34

Potential represented as SG per pound per gallon.


Hops

   Amount     Name                              Form    Alpha  IBU  Boil Time
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
  5.00 g.     Nugget                            Whole   13.00   8.2  75 min.
 40.00 g.     Perle                             Pellet   6.30  34.8  75 min.
 40.00 g.     Saaz                         Pellet   3.00   0.0  0 min.

2 x packets of Safale US-05

Kolsch

I have been brewing lately, but not blogging about it. I'll try to keep this a little more up to date.

Decided to brew something light and inoffensive for Christmas, as I have family visiting who are not especially in love with big hoppy brews. This is from Brewing Classic Styles and I've brewed it twice before, though I used the White Labs yeast both times, here I'm using WY2565. Wyeast is very easy for me to get, but white labs is a pain to get hold of. My former source in New South Wales is now out of business and I don't think I'll bother finding a new one.

The grain bill and hop schedule are both very simple. Unfortunately I only realised when I got home from the brew shop that my Hersbrucker hops were 1.8% AA. This was about half what I expected so I threw in a small amount of nugget to bump up the IBUs to something reasonable.

I recirculated this mash at 65C for 60 minutes, then did a rest at 72C for 20 minutes. I no-chilled this and took a 2L starter to which I pitched a full packet of WY2565. About 18 hours later I pitched this into the full batch at 17C. 12 hours later (this morning) I had noticeable activity.

Here's the recipe:


Grain/Extract/Sugar

   %     Amount     Name                          Origin        Potential SRM
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
 95.4     4.67 kg.  Pilsener                        Germany        1.037      1
  4.6     0.23 kg.  Vienna Malt                   Germany        1.036      4

Potential represented as SG per pound per gallon.


Hops

   Amount     Name                              Form    Alpha  IBU  Boil Time
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
 40.00 g.    Hersbrucker                   Pellet   1.80  10.6  70 min.
  6.00 g.     Nugget                            Pellet  13.00  11.5  70 min.


WYeast WY2565 Kölsch

SNPA . . . again

I'm back. Just lost interest in brewing for a while - but I think it's back again.

To ease my way back into things I've brewed yet another version of this excellent Sierra Nevada Pale Ale clone. I've used safale us-05 to keep things simple, and also no-chilled to make it probably the simplest brew day I've had in a long long time.

Recipe for a 23L batch:

Grain/Extract/Sugar

   %     Amount     Name                          Origin        Potential SRM
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
 92.2     4.70 kg.  Pale Ale Malt (2-row)         Australia      1.037      2
  7.8     0.40 kg.  Crystal 105L                  UK             1.033    105

Potential represented as SG per pound per gallon.


Hops

   Amount     Name                              Form    Alpha  IBU  Boil Time
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
 20.00 g.     Nugget                            Pellet  13.60  29.5  50 min.
 20.00 g.     Perle                                Pellet   7.70   8.5  20 min.
 80.00 g.     Cascade                           Pellet   5.75   0.0  0 min.
 

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

Pacman

Brewer's Gold

Wow, it's been quite a delay between my last post and this one. I've moved house, which means that I now have a garage, and hence somewhere to brew indoors so I'm not so vulnerable to the weather and lack of daylight. Also I can have the brewery set up permanently, which saves me an hour or so of assembly and disassembly every brew day. Unfortunately the move led to a long hiatus in my brewing, and I've had no beer on tap for nearly three months now - far too long!!

The Beginnings of a Permanent Installation

I've got a few brews lined up, but this is the first: a clone of Crouch Vale Brewer's Gold. I was actually at 'The Great British Beer Festival" one year when the original won champion beer, and a fine drop it was too.

The plan is to do a no-chill, with a huge dose of brewer's gold hops just before flame out. This should provide a good deal of bitterness and hop aroma/flavour, while a very small charge at the start of the boil will keep things under control and add some IBUs.

This is really a summer brew, but I've had the hops on hand since April and have been planning to have a go at it since long before then. It's a chance to get to know another hop variety, and should be an easy drinking ale on the handpump in a short period of time.

I'd like to be drinking this in three weeks, so I'll be taking a large starter to innoculate with WLP006, and I'll get the fermentation happening within a few days.

Here's the recipe:

 Grain/Extract/Sugar

   %     Amount     Name                          Origin        Potential SRM
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
 100.0     3.91 kg.  Lager Malt(2-row)             UK             1.037      1

Potential represented as SG per pound per gallon.


Hops

   Amount     Name                              Form    Alpha  IBU  Boil Time
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
  5.00 g.     Brewer's Gold                     Pellet   7.00   5.1  60 min.
 95.00 g.     Brewer's Gold                     Pellet   7.00  25.9  15 min.


Yeast
-----
WLP006

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

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

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

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

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

-----

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.

I'm back

I'm finally back in Melbourne from an extended trip back home to Ireland. I'm happy to report that the craft beer scene in Ireland has finally awoken. Existing microbrewers are expanding and new ones emerging, and most off-license premises seem to have a selection of some sort.

I'm planning to brew this Saturday, my first of 2013. It will be something in the 4.5% abv region, as I want to turn it around in the minimum possible time (I find about 4 weeks is the best you can do). It will be something English, probably with either the Wyeast West Yorkshire strain or the Fullers strain. I'll leave the final decision until Friday.

Baritone Bitter V2

Hot on the heels of the Landlord I made over the weekend, I diving straight into a hopefully improved version of my recent baritone bitter. This was a beer inspired by cask bass, with a heavy dose of Northern Brewer hops. Besides being far too bitter, I felt that there were a few other areas ripe for tweaking.

First, I'll say what's not changing. The water treatment, a 'burtonizing', and the yeast, WY1028 will stay the same. These were two of the more successful elements of my first version. The malt bill is only slightly modified, going to 6% simpsons medium crystal, up 1% from the last version.

In the hopping schedule I'm dropping the early hopping back to 10g of Northern Brewer, from 15g previously. This beer is no-chilled, and the flameout additions are 20g of Northern Brewer and 20g Williamette. I'm calculating the flameout additions as a 20min addition because of the no-chill, and altogether this brings my total IBUs to 26ish, from 34ish in the previous version. In fact I think I somehow ended up nearer to 40ish in the previous version. The williamette should also help to flavour the hop palate a bit. This was quite pleasant but a little monotone last time round.


Recipe:

Bass

A ProMash Recipe Report

Recipe Specifics
----------------

Batch Size (L):          22.50    Wort Size (L):     22.50
Total Grain (kg):         4.21
Anticipated OG:          1.044    Plato:             10.95
Anticipated SRM:          13.2
Anticipated IBU:          25.9
Brewhouse Efficiency:       75 %
Wort Boil Time:             60    Minutes


Grain/Extract/Sugar

   %     Amount     Name                          Origin   Potential SRM
------------------------------------------------------------------------
 93.0     3.91 kg.  Pale Malt (Maris Otter)       UK        1.038      3
  5.9     0.25 kg.  Crystal 80L                   USA       1.033     80
  1.1     0.05 kg.  Roasted Barley (Simpson's)    UK        1.029    685

Potential represented as SG per pound per gallon.


Hops

   Amount     Name                         Form    Alpha  IBU  Boil Time
------------------------------------------------------------------------
 10.00 g.     Northern Brewer              Pellet   9.00  13.2  60 min.
 20.00 g.     Northern Brewer              Pellet   9.00   8.9  20 min.
 20.00 g.     Willamette                   Whole    4.30   3.8  20 min.


Yeast
-----

WY1028 London 

Water Treatment

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

0.75tsp CaCl2  2.5tsp CaSO4  1tsp MgSO4 

Landlord (Again!)

Back to my favourite beer, Landlord. Since I got the hand pump a few months back I've been looking forward to pouring the first pale golden pint of styrian infused perfection. I held off brewing this again because I was waiting for a pound of styrian goldings to arrive from the US. Now they're here, and there's no excuse, a big starter of WY1469 has been on the stirplate, and we're ready to go.

The malt bill is exactly the same as last time round, but I've upped the late hops, quite a bit in the case of the styrians. Water treatement is more or less the same, but with an extra quarter teaspoon of gypsum. I also added 1.5ml of Lactic Acid to the mash to bring the Ph to where I wanted it (around 5.5).

Recipe:

Landlord

A ProMash Recipe Report

Recipe Specifics
----------------

Batch Size (L):          22.50    Wort Size (L):     22.50
Total Grain (kg):         4.36
Anticipated OG:          1.045    Plato:             11.14
Anticipated SRM:           5.3
Anticipated IBU:          31.3
Brewhouse Efficiency:       75 %
Wort Boil Time:             60    Minutes


Grain/Extract/Sugar

   %     Amount     Name                          Origin   Potential SRM
------------------------------------------------------------------------
 96.4     4.20 kg.  Pale Malt (Golden Promise)    UK        1.037      2
  3.6     0.16 kg.  Crystal 60L                   UK        1.035     60

Potential represented as SG per pound per gallon.


Hops

   Amount     Name                         Form    Alpha  IBU  Boil Time
------------------------------------------------------------------------
 42.00 g.     Willamette                   Pellet   4.30  26.4  60 min.
 25.00 g.     Goldings - E.K.              Pellet   5.00   4.9  15 min.
 50.00 g.     Styrian Goldings              Pellet   5.25   0.0  0 min.


Yeast
-----

WY1469 Yorkshire

Rebel Rising V2

A few months back I made a pleasant red ale loosely based on the Franciscan Well's Rebel Red, a staple of my beer drinking diet when I lived in Cork. I felt there were a few aspects of my version that could be improved upon, so on Saturday I went about doing just that.

The grain bill for this beer changed a little to reflect what I perceived as  a flaw in the last version - too much rummy raisiny flavour from the heavy dose of dark crystal. I dropped the total crystal bill by a small amount, and subbed half of that total for Simpsons Light Crystal. Another change was a lighter dose of early hops and a heavier dose of late hops. Since the beer is no chilled, even the late hops have a significant effect on bitterness, so pushing more of the hops to later on should give more hop character without changing the bitterness level.

I also changed the yeast, though I didn't really have a very good reason to do that, the yeast character in the previous version was actually a highlight. However I had a vial of White Labs Bedford Ale yeast platinum that I was really keen to use, so I decided to try it out on this beer. All but 15ml of the vial was pitched to a 1L starter and pitched at high krausen to the main batch.

Rebel Red V2

A ProMash Recipe Report

Recipe Specifics
----------------

Batch Size (L):          22.50    Wort Size (L):     22.50
Total Grain (kg):         4.06
Anticipated OG:          1.045    Plato:             11.11
Anticipated SRM:          15.5
Anticipated IBU:          27.3
Brewhouse Efficiency:       75 %
Wort Boil Time:             60    Minutes

Pre-Boil Amounts
----------------

Evaporation Rate:      15.00    Percent Per Hour
Pre-Boil Wort Size:   26.47    L
Pre-Boil Gravity:      1.038    SG          9.50  Plato


Grain/Extract/Sugar

   %     Amount     Name                     Origin Potential SRM
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
 82.8     3.36 kg.  Pale Malt (Maris Otter)  UK     1.038      3
  3.4     0.14 kg.  Crystal 120L             UK     1.033    120
  3.4     0.14 kg.  Crystal 40L              USA    1.034     40
  1.7     0.07 kg.  Roasted Barley (Simpson's)UK    1.029    685
  8.6     0.35 kg.  Cane Sugar              Generic 1.046      0

Potential represented as SG per pound per gallon.


Hops

   Amount     Name                 Form    Alpha  IBU  Boil Time
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
 15.00 g.     East Kent Goldings   Pellet   4.30   9.4  60 min.
 15.00 g.     Willamette           Pellet   4.00   8.8  60 min.
 20.00 g.     East Kent Goldings   Pellet   4.30   4.2  20 min.
 20.00 g.     Willamette           Pellet   5.00   4.9  20 min.


Yeast
-----

White Labs WLP006 Bedford British Ale


Water Profile
-------------

Profile:           Pale Ale
Profile known for:

Calcium(Ca):          71.0 ppm
Magnesium(Mg):        10.0 ppm
Sodium(Na):           13.0 ppm
Sulfate(SO4):        116.0 ppm
Chloride(Cl):         79.0 ppm
biCarbonate(HCO3):    30.0 ppm

pH: 7.30

Note that the hop times were actually 45mins and 0mins, and the batch was no-chilled. Also the 0.35kg Cane sugar was actually homemade Invert No.2. Water treatment was 1tsp CaCl2, 1tsp CaSO4, 0.5tsp MgSO4 into very soft Melbourne water.

Baritone Bitter tasting

A few weeks back I wrote about the Bass inspired beer I brewed using all Northern Brewer hops. I've decided to call it Baritone Bitter, as it's not a clone at all really, just has a few things in common with cask Bass.

Apart from a few Sierra Nevada clones where I used it as a sub for Perle in a mid boil addition, I hadn't really experimented much with Northern Brewer. The results are quite surprising. There's a total absence of fruity hop aromas/flavours, some floral, but a huge amount of that earthy almost root vegetable aroma - it reminds me of a beetroot chocolate cake I made a while back. This is a really interesting beer, with flaws, but certainly something to build on for the future.

The flaws - it's too bitter. I no-chilled this batch, and usually when I no-chill the late hops are relatively low in AA%. My Northern Brewer were 9%, and I think the late hops have had a huge contribution to the bitterness. I think I'm up at or over 40IBUs, and this could stand to drop by about 10 or so. In saying that, now that it's fully matured in the keg, the malty notes are coming through more and are masking the bitterness well. Obviously the bitterness is dropping back a little with time too. Early on the bitterness was overpowering. For such a poorly balanced beer, it managed an 87 in a recent comp (where it was still a week or two away from proper condition), so I'm quite happy with it. The water treatment has had a huge effect. It's hard to put it in words, but the hop character is transformed into a huge multi-layered effect, and brings me right back to pints of Marston's Pedigree I've had before. The yeast is spot on, with definite 'English' character that is dry and minerally without being at all harsh.

This is another recipe to build on and improve. I will probably scale back the bitterness about 5-10IBUs next time, and bump up the crystal slightly, to 6 or 7%. I will also add another late hop, probably East Kent Goldings, or maybe Styrians. While the hop character is really interesting, it could be a little broader, and a bigger floral dimension would really add to the character of the beer.

Overall a very worthwhile experiment!

Síofra Red Ale

organised chaos

In a radical departure to my usual beer interests, this weekend I brewed a version of Jamil Zainasheff's Evil Twin. This is the beer he wrote about several years ago in the American Homebrewer's Association "Zymurgy" magazine, reprinted here on his own website. It introduces the concept of hop bursting - forgoing an early hop addition in favour of pushing all hop additions to the last 20 minutes. I've been intrigued by this ever since I first read about it, but I held off trying it out until I got to try a Heretic Evil Twin last week. A local distributor is now cold shipping several American beers to Australia, Evil twin being one. The hop character is incredibly complex, and is beautifully balanced by a heavy malt backbone. I've read here that Heretic is using a different malt bill and hop bill for their Evil Twin compared to the version on Jamil's website, though the principle remains the same.

I'll be trying to get close to the Heretic Evil Twin. If I could criticize anything about Jamil's recipes, it's that his malt bills seem far too busy to me, with the Zymurgy Evil Twin being a good example. The Heretic Evil Twin malt bill he describes in the link above is much more to my liking, with a simple pale ale background providing a platform for a huge amount of good quality medium crystal malt. A little roasted barley is added for colour. Jamil suggest a half sack of RB in a 30bbl batch, which seems to come out at about 80g for a 22.5 litre batch. Actually this ends up being quite dark according to ProMash, so I'll scale it back to around 40g.

I am a little worried to be using 12% crystal, but I guess with that level of hopping you need to go a little crazy. The hopping itself consists of very generous amounts of citra and columbus. I got about 250g of citra in a mucked up hop order about a year back, and they have been carefully stored since then awaiting a suitable brew, so I'm glad to be able to use a hundred or so grams at long last. I also got some columbus in that order, but I decided that they are past their best so I bought an 80g packet from my LHBS - you will notice that I use all 80g in this brew. A small charge is added at 20mins, then a big one at 10 and at flameout. Jamil says that Heretic Evil Twin is dry hopped, and I'm planning to dry hop mine too. I'll wait until fermentation is complete and then I'll do a taste test to determine the actual amounts, but the recipe below has what I'm expecting to use.

I mentioned a huge old keg I got a while back from Ebay, well recently I swapped it for a regular 50L keg. I decided that I'm unlikely to want to do double batches for a while yet, and the 50L keg is a bit more realistic in size for my operation.

For this brew I moved away from 'brew in a bag' and actually mashed into about 17L of liqour, and fly sparged another 17 or so to get to my pre-boil volume. The mash itself was multi-step, 65C for 40 minutes, 72C for 20, and finally a mash out at 78 for 10 minutes before sparging with 78 degree water. I collected about 27 litres and boiled down to 23.5 (allowing a little extra wort to account for extra loss to hop debris). I'll write more on the system in another month or two when I get it dialed in right, this brew was a bit of an experiment.

I pitched the yeast from a big stirred starter of Pacman - recovered from the Beamish clone I recently did. It's at 17C in the fermenting fridge, and fermentation is extremely vigorous. This morning it was bursting out the top and the hop aroma was pretty incredible, which can only be a good sign for the finished product.

Here's the recipe:

Siofra Red Ale

A ProMash Recipe Report

Recipe Specifics
----------------

Batch Size (L):          23.50    Wort Size (L):     23.50
Total Grain (kg):         6.43
Anticipated OG:          1.063    Plato:             15.39
Anticipated EBC:          33.6
Anticipated IBU:          28.5
Brewhouse Efficiency:       75 %
Wort Boil Time:             60    Minutes

Grain/Extract/Sugar

   %     Amount     Name                   Origin   Potential EBC
-----------------------------------------------------------------
 87.6     5.63 kg.  Pale Ale Malt (2-row)  Australia  1.037     5
 11.8     0.76 kg.  Crystal 77L                   UK  1.035   148
  0.6     0.04 kg.  Roasted Barley (Simpson's)    UK  1.029  1350

Potential represented as SG per pound per gallon.


Hops

   Amount     Name                              Form    Alpha  IBU  Boil Time
---------------------------------------------------------------
  9.00 g.     Citra                 Pellet  13.40   5.1  20 min.
  8.00 g.     Columbus              Pellet  15.20   5.4  20 min.
 25.00 g.     Citra                 Pellet  13.40   8.5  10 min.
 24.00 g.     Columbus              Pellet  15.20   9.6  10 min.
 28.00 g.     Citra                 Pellet  13.40   0.0  0 min.
 25.00 g.     Columbus              Pellet  15.20   0.0  0 min.
 28.00 g.     Citra                 Pellet  13.40   0.0  Dry Hop
 23.00 g.     Columbus              Pellet  15.20   0.0  Dry Hop


Yeast
-----

WYeast 1764 Rogue PacMan (VSS)


Water Profile
-------------

Profile:           Pale Ale
Profile known for:

Calcium(Ca):          71.0 ppm
Magnesium(Mg):        10.0 ppm
Sodium(Na):           13.0 ppm
Sulfate(SO4):        116.0 ppm
Chloride(Cl):         79.0 ppm
biCarbonate(HCO3):    30.0 ppm

pH: 7.30


Mash Schedule
-------------

Saccharification Rest Temp :  65  Time:  40
Mash-out Rest Temp :          72  Time:  20
Sparge Temp :                 78  Time:  10

All temperature measurements are degrees Celsius.