Brewday 25/09/17 - Red Rye Ale

It's rye time I did this...

I always enjoy any beer that features rye but I've never brewed with it myself until now. This beer also includes some of my homegrown First Gold hops so it's a double first - I hope it turns out well.

Recipe:

• 3.15kg Irish Ale Malt
• 0.5kg Red X Malt
• 0.5kg Rye Malt
• 0.5kg Munich Malt
• 100g Chocolate Malt
• 25g Northdown (60 min)
• 25g First Gold (15 min)
• 44g First Gold (0 min)
• 50g Cascade (dry hop 4 days)
• 36g Mosiac (dry hop 4 days)
• 1 pk Safale S04 Ale Yeast

OG =1.045 (efficiency 68% - still not very good)

Anyway it's in the fermenter, I plan to bottle it later this week.

Update 06/10/17

I bottled the beer today, FG was 1.010 (exactly as predicted) giving an ABV of 4.57%. A quick taste suggests this beer will be a very pleasant drink once it has finished conditioning.

Brewday 18/09/2017 - Black Coffee Stout

Black Coffee in Beer

With the nights drawing in it was time to brew a dark beer, and in a radical move I decided to add an extra ingredient to the usual line-up of water, malt, hops and yeast. This beer also contained coffee, and just to make it extra crafty I used cold brewed coffee. As this was a bit of an experiment for me I only brewed a small batch of nine litres split into two demijohns.

Recipe (BIAB):

• Mash for 1 hr at 67°C
• Boil for 60 mins
• Mash water volume 13.6lt
• Pale Malt 1.35kg
• Crystal 15L 160g
• Chocolate Malt 110g
• Black malt 50g 
• Rolled Oats 180g
• Northdown 25g (60 mins)
• Northdown 25g (0 mins)
• Gervin GV12 English Ale Yeast 11g pack
• 100ml cold brewed coffee (added to one demijohn)
• Recipe in Brewers Friend

Naturally things didn't go totally as planned, firstly my efficiency was way down at 61% (usually I get around 75%) which meant I was going to end up with an ABV of 3.95%, a lot lower than what I wanted. I also managed to miscalculate the hop additions, this was a scaled down recipe but I didn't reduce the hops at the same rate as the malts resulting in a higher IBU rating than originally expected. Obviously I couldn't do much about the hops but I decided to increase the ABV by adding some brewing sugar (dextrose) to the fermenters. I made a solution with 80g of dextrose and 200ml of boiling water, allowed it to cool and then split it between the two demijohns. I have never done this before but it seemed to work. I made the addition after two days fermentation and there was certainly some increased airlock activity and a final gravity reading of 1.010 would indicate a theoretical ABV of 4.42% which is a bit of an improvement. The downside of adding sugar is it tends to make the beer taste thinner and less full-bodied but hopefully I've got the balance right by just adding a small amount. 

I made the cold brewed coffee by mixing 50g of coarse ground coffee with 350ml of water in a sterilised mason jar and leaving it in the fridge for 24 hours. I then filtered it several times to remove all the grounds and added 100ml to one of the demijohns after four days of fermentation. I left this for another week and then bottled both beers. Each demijohn contained 4.25 litres so I primed each with 20g of brewing sugar. Now I have 12 x 330ml of each stout conditioning, one with coffee and one without. It will be interesting to see how they compare and whether the coffee actually improves the beer.