Brewday 01/02/2019 - Rye Caramber!

Think of a name. Then brew the beer

I'd been meaning to brew another Rye beer for a bit so I checked through my ingredients to put together a recipe. I still had some amber malt which I used for the first time in the bitter I made in October, and which I thought added a distinct malty flavour to the beer, so I planned to combine this with some rye and crystal rye. This led me to come up with the name Rye Caramber (thank you Bart Simpson). Now all I had to do was brew the beer. As per usual I mashed in and went out to work, returning about four hours later. I also repeated my hop extract experiment with the Centennial hops, 20g in a cafetiere/French press with 750ml water at 70°C left to steep for 20 mins and added to the fermenter for the last three days of fermentation.

Recipe (BIAB)

• Mash for 240 mins at 65°C
• Boil for 60 mins
• Mash water volume 28.2lt
• Maris Otter 3.865kg
• Wheat Malt 250g
• Amber malt 300g
• Crystal Malt 45L 135g
• Rye Malt 500g
• Crystal Rye 250g
• Northdown 7% 20g (60 mins)
• Northdown 7% 20g (15 mins)
• Cascade (6.1%) 50g whirlpool 20 mins at 70°C
• Cascade (6.1%) 50g dry hop for 3 days
• Centennial (7%) 20g "hop extract" for 3 days
• Fermentis Safale US05 11g pack pitched at 17°C
• Recipe in Brewer's Friend

Results

OG: 1.058

FG: 1.010

ABV: 6.34%

IBU: 40

Wow! This is excellent. A big hoppy aroma, a nice spicy flavour from the rye but with a bit of sweetness and although it's quite bitter the high abv balances it well. I am very pleased with this. I love the flavour of rye, with the hop aroma and the alcohol this works really well.

Brewday 28/05/18 Motueka Pale

Pale and Hoppy

I always try to keep a good range of ingredients in stock so I can brew at short notice. I also tend to have recipes created in advance which (although usually subject to last minute tweaks) gives me the ability to brew some beer when the opportunity arises. This was case at here when despite it being half term the rest of the family were out all day and I only had a couple of hours of work to do. I had the ingredients to make a nice hoppy pale ale so I got the mash on early, nipped out to work, and was back after 2½ hours to finish the brew.

I recently bought some Motueka hops and yeast from Crossmyloof Brew Supplies who I believe are a contract brewer who also repack hops and yeast to sell to homebrewers at very competitive prices. I had never dealt with them before so I was interested to see how the ingredients performed, especially the yeast which was their US Pale Ale Yeast.

Recipe BIAB

• Mash for 150 mins at 67°C

• Boil for 60 minutes

• Mash water volume 29.3lt

• 2.7kg Maris Otter
• 0.5kg Munich Malt

• 200g Flaked Maize

• 200g Wheat Malt

• 100g Crystal Malt 45L

• 100g Carapils

• 15g Northdown 60 mins

• 12g First Gold 15 mins

• 50g Motueka whirlpool 20 mins

• 33g Perle dry hop 4 days

• 1 pack Crossmyloof US Pale Ale Yeast
• Recipe in Brewers Friend

Results

I pitched the yeast at 20°C which was about as low as I could get it during the UK's current never-ending warm spell. I also put the fermenter in a pan of cold water wrapped in a damp towel to try and keep the temperature down during fermentation which was fairly successful, the temperature stayed at around 21°C. Fermentation was very quick, the gravity reading was down to 1.010 after 3 days. I bottled the beer after one week.

OG: 1.040

FG: 1.008

ABV: 4.15%

The beer was pretty cloudy when I bottled it and the yeast was not as flocculent as others I've used, the yeast cake after fermentation was not as compact as usual. In fact bottling took far longer than usual with blobs of yeast blocking the bottling wand. I think the warm weather has affected the fermentation. However it seems to be clearing up in the bottles so hopefully it will end up as good hoppy pale ale.

Brewday 02/03/2018 IPA

Heritage Homebrew

For my next beer I decided to brew an old style English IPA. Not to a genuine heritage recipe but I took inspiration from my copy of The Homebrewer's Guide to Vintage Beer by Ron Pattison (whose blog "Shut up about Barclay Perkins" is great source of historical beery information) The 19th Century IPA recipes featured in the book aren't especially strong - around 5-6% abv - but are extremely bitter with IBU ratings in excess of 150 and hopping rates of up to 18g per litre. I didn't want to go for such a high level of bitterness so I used most hops as late addition and for dry hopping, with (high for me!) an overall hopping rate of 10g per litre. The IBU's are around 52 so still quite bitter. This brew was the first time I tried adjusting the water profile. One of my fellow local homebrewers gave me a water adjustment spreadsheet with our local water profile data from a recent report. After some messing about in Excel I ended up adding 6g of calcium chloride and 6g of Epsom salts to the mash, whether this will make any significant difference remains to be seen.

Recipe (BIAB)

• Mash for 90 mins at 66°C
• Boil for 60 mins
• Mash water volume 28.5lt
• Maris Otter 4.8kg
• Wheat Malt 150g
• Crystal Malt 45L 250g
• Flaked Maize 250g
• Northdown 7% 25g (60 mins)
• Northdown 7% 25g (30 mins)
• First Gold (homegrown) 25g whirlpool 75°C for 30 mins
• Cluster 7% 25g whirlpool 75°C for 30 mins
• First Gold (homegrown) 25g dry hop for 4 days
• Cluster 7% dry hop for 4 days 
• Nottingham Ale Yeast 11g pack pitched at 18°C
• Recipe in Brewers Friend

Results 12/03/2018

I bottled this after 10 days fermentation

OG 1.057

FG 1.012

ABV 6%

Now I have to give it a few weeks to condition before I can taste it.

Brewday 08/12/2017 Another Porter

Brown Stuff

I had one last opportunity to brew in 2017 so chose to make a porter. I had some dark malts in stock and I could use some more homegrown hops and free up some space in the freezer. 

Recipe (BIAB):

• Mash for 90 mins at 66°C
• Boil for 60 mins
• Mash water volume 28lt
• Pale Malt 3.5kg
• Munich Light 0.5kg
• Crystal 60L 200g
• Chocolate Malt 240g
• Black malt 60g 
• Rolled Oats 250g
• Northdown 7% 15g (60 mins)
• Northdown 7% 25g (15 mins)
• First Gold (homegrown) 25g whirlpool 75°C for 30 mins
• Cascade 4.2% 25g whirlpool 75°C for 30 mins
• First Gold (homegrown) 63g dry hop for 3 days 
• Gervin GV12 English Ale Yeast 11g pack
• Recipe in Brewers Friend

The whirlpool addition is a bit of a misnomer, I just chilled the wort to 75°C, added the hops, gave it a stir and left it for 30 minutes before finishing chilling. This should get more aroma from the hops as opposed to adding at flameout when the wort is still at boiling point.

Results 18/12/2017

I bottled this after 10 days in the fermenter.

OG 1.049 (efficiency 70%)

FG 1.009

ABV 5.17%

I'll give it a couple of weeks conditioning and try some in 2018, hopefully it will be good, the sample I tried from the gravity reading was very tasty!

Update 31/01/2018

Yep, still tasty!

Brewday 01/11/17 Sierra Nevada Pale Ale Clone

Using up free hops

A local microbrewery kindly offered my homebrew club some surplus hops, obviously we took advantage of this and found ourselves in possession of a substantial amount (by homebrewing standards) of Northdown and Cascade. After splitting them between us we had to decide what to do with them so it was proposed that we all attempt to brew a clone version of Sierra Nevada Pale Ale and bring it along to taste at the December meeting. 

There are plenty of recipes online and most of them share a few common traits; A simple malt bill of pale and crystal, and lots of cascade hops.

Recipe:

• 4.5kg Maris Otter
• 0.3kg Crystal Malt 45L
• 24g Northdown 7% (60 min)
• 23g Northdown 7% (25 min)
• 21g Cascade 4.2% (10 min)
• 50g Cascade 4.2%(0 min)
• 130g Cascade (dry hop 6 days)
• 1 pk Safale US05 Ale Yeast
• Mash for 1 hour at 68ºC
• Boil for 1 hour
• 18lt into the fermenter

I've gone a bit over the top with the dry hopping but these hops were pretty old and had a very low alpha acid content.

Results:

Once again the efficiency was disappointing, down at 64%. 

OG 1.054

FG 1.013
IBU 44

ABV 5.4%

I bottled this on the 13th November so it will have over 4 weeks to condition. I hope it turns out well, it certainly tasted good during bottling.

Update 22/12/17

I've been drinking this over the last couple of weeks and it's quite a pleasant drink. Compared to Sierra Nevada Pale Ale I find it more bitter and not quite as hoppy but at least it's the right colour!  

Homegrown Hops

Grow It Yourself

Hops are expensive, for homebrewers 100g of dried hops can cost anything up to £6+ a pack. This makes brewing super hoppy American style pale ales quite an expensive process. So in my never-ending quest to spend less money I bought and planted two hop plants (Prima Donna or First Gold variety) early last year. After 3-4 weeks of nothing happening there was a sudden burst of activity, several shoots appeared from the ground and rapidly scaled the fence. The blurb which came with the plants warned me to expect very little in the first year, which was fortunate as very little was precisely what I got. It is not until the third year that the plant will reach its full potential so I was not expecting much extra this year. Once again in early March several shoots appeared and grew rapidly up and along my fence, however this year I picked over 1.6kg of fresh hops which I dried in a food dehyrator down to a dry weight of 350g.

The hop fence

There's something quite satisfying about growing your own hops for brewing although given that the hop plants cost £18 I'm still out of pocket as 350g of First Gold only costs about £14. Next year I should get a bigger harvest and I can also split the hop rhizomes to get more plants, so over time I should save a bit of money. I also found hops growing wild near me last year so in early March I dug up some rhizomes and planted cuttings in my garden. I don't know the variety but they do smell great, were free and for a first year's crop I've done pretty well, far better than last year's bought plants. These hops aren't quite ready to pick yet but when they are I'll brew a green hop beer.

Wild Hops

Last year I dried my meagre harvest on the window sill, but this took too long and the end result was poor. This year I have used a food dehydrator which has given great results. I dried 500g of fresh hops down to 110g in 10-12 hours, with the dehydrator at the lowest heat setting of 35°C. Higher temperatures than this risk burning off the much sought-after but volatile hop oils.

Food Dehydrator

My total harvest was just over 2kg (1.65kg First Gold and 400g of the wild variety) which I dried down to 450g and froze for future brewdays.
In conclusion I have to say that growing hops is very straightforward, they require very little special care and hopefully I'll get to brew some great beer.