Red Face V2

It's been a few weekends now, but we brewed up our second round of the Red Face Ale and all went well. Nick and Byran were at my place bright and early for the brew day. This was Bryan's second time really brewing the all-grain way and he seems to be getting it down.

For this brew day, instead of doing two different brews, we decided to just brew one kind and make 30 gallons of it so we could each get 10 gallons of Red Face for our selves. To achieve this, we essentially made a 20 gallon batch and a 10 gallon batch. One interesting note was that with the 20 gallon batch we just used cascade for the flavor hops. With the 10 gallon batch, we used only Liberty for the flavor. I wanted to see what the character of each of the hops was.



We made some adjustments to the recipe on this one, replacing the black patent with chocolate and using a 45L crystal instead of the 10L. Both of the batches had the same malt profile:

10 Gal
18.5 lbs 2-row US
3.5 lbs Crystal 45L
3.5 lbs Munich
.25 lbs Chocolate
2oz Pearle (60 min)
.55oz Brewers Gold (60 min)
.55oz Amarillo (40 min)
1oz Liberty (1min to cool down)
Wyeast 1056 (American Ale)

20 Gal
Double the grain bill above and replace the Liberty with 3oz of Cascade

Overall it was a pretty good brew day. The OG for the 20 gal batch was 1.054 and the OG for the 10 gal was 1.048 (I forgot why it worked out that way, this is why I usually do my blog posts right after I brew). Both were spot on and yielded 10 gallons for each of us. I have since racked mine to the keg and tasted the two of them back to back.

The 20gal finished with1.014 and the 10 gallon finished with 1.007 so they are pretty close on ABV, but the 20 gallon (cascade) one is noticeably more full bodied. The 10 gallon (liberty) batch has a lighter mouth feel and lacks a lot of the character of the cascade brew. However, it's a lighter more drinkable brew for the summer.

In any event, they are both pretty good brews. I am going to be happy. On another note, I just picked up 22lbs of wild flower honey from the Regional Market. It's Melomel time!

Cheers!

Fun with beer

So Saturday morning we got up bright and early and had ourselves a great brew day. I had the water on the flame by 6:30am! Nick showed up at 7 with some Mcd's treats and we were off.

We struck the water at about 174f because we were not paying attention. Now my beer smith is always saying 170 to strike at 158f, but we are usually closer to 152 when we strike at 170. When we took the striking water off of the heat, we were climbing above 174 and just put it on. We were able to strike at exactly 158.

Beer smith also called for 9.62gal of water to strike the 26lbs+ of grain we had. This is where we ran into a problem that we have been having for a while now, the Igloo Ice Cube Cooler we have is 12 gallons and does not handle the 10 gallon batches very well. So we were only able to strike 8 1/2 gallons.

We held it for 60 min and the temp kept at between 158 and 157 for the whole time despite the cool temps on Saturday morning. That's the little mash tun that could!

After 60min, we took the last gallon that we were going to add and got it up to a boil so that we could get the temp up for mash out. We ran some of the wort off into the brew pot to make room for the mash out and added the boiling water being sure to stir pretty aggressively to avoid hot spots. Once the grain bed had a steady temp of 168-170, we let it hold for 10 min and started up our batch sparge water.

We did two batch sparges, the first was 5 gallons and the second was 3 and both were at 170f. We were planning on a 90 min boil so we wanted to have 13 gallons to start with and we got that and then some.

Our pre-boil gravity 1.035, which was lower than the 1.041 beer smith told us we should have, but as the intrepid brewers we are, we brewed on!

After getting a few close calls on boil overs, we were able to get a healthy rolling boil and started the 90 min boil process. I was glad we got started early because there was no rush and we were able to wait the full 1/2 hr before adding the first hops. We added the 4oz of Golding's (5%) into the hop bag and let it dangle.

Our final hops addition was 1 oz at 5 min and some irish moss for good luck.

We separated the wort into two buckets and split the 1000ml starter between the two. We ended up using London Ale (1028) for the brew as Ed was out of 1335. It's an interesting yeast. After using the ESB and American Ale for the last few brews, it's noticeable that the London is a lot slower out of the gates that the other two. But it's chugging away now.

Our OG would up at 1.054 which was exactly what we were looking for, so I am assuming the additional time we used in the boil helped. We dry hopped it with an OZ each of Cascade leaf hops (5%) and the airlock has a very hoppy smell coming out of it.

Ted sent me a message on the previous post concerned with our dangerously low aroma hops rate and I have to thank him. If a fellow brewer gives you an excuse to add more hops, take it! I think I am going to pick up another OZ of the same leaf hops to add to the secondary and maybe a third to hop to the keg! Who knows.

Anyway, all is well at the brew house.

Cheers!

PS- The brew is going to be called "Red Face Ale" after the guy passed out in the picture.

Back at it with a red ale

So after an election week break (I hope everyone went out and voted!) we are back in business. We decided that this week we were going to brew up a nice hoppy American Red Ale. We were going for something along the lines of a fat tire red ale and a few others we saw.

Listed below is the 10 gallon recipe we came up with:

Recipe Specifications
--------------------------
Batch Size: 10.00 gal
Boil Size: 12.55 gal
Estimated OG: 1.054 SG
Estimated Color: 12.3 SRM
Estimated IBU: 38.6 IBU
Brewhouse Efficiency: 59.0 %
Boil Time: 90 Minutes

Ingredients:
------------

18.50 lb Pale Malt (2 Row) US (2.0 SRM) Grain 72.1 %
3.50 lb Caramel/Crystal Malt - 10L (10.0 SRM) Grain 13.6 %
3.50 lb Munich Malt - 20L (20.0 SRM) Grain 13.6 %
0.15 lb Black (Patent) Malt (500.0 SRM) Grain 0.6 %
4.00 oz Goldings, B.C. [5.00%] (60 min) Hops 36.6 IBU
1.00 oz Cascade [5.50%] (5 min) Hops 2.0 IBU
1.00 oz Centenial [5.00%] (Dry Hop 8 days) Hops -
1 Pkgs London Ale (Wyeast Labs #1028) Yeast-Ale


Mash Schedule: My Mash
Total Grain Weight: 25.65 lb
----------------------------
Name Description Step Temp Step Time
Step Add 9.62 gal of water at 168.4 F158.0 F 70 min
Mashout Heat to 168.0 F over 2 min 168.0 F 10 min

This should come together nicely. It seems as though it's going to be a pretty hoppy red ale, obviously not like Cascazilla (Ithaca Brewing) or anything, but it should have a nice hop profile.

Nick made this recipe and this is his first stab at playing around with the creation of recipes. I will hopefully have a few more posts in the next few days to catch up on a few things that happened while I was running around including a cider update, new kegs and a keg system I built with Nick.

Cheers!

PS- I also entered the old balls into a brewing contest based out in Saratoga.