Beer

After a long hiatus, I decided to brew again. I was running out of beer. My brother is visiting from Thailand, so despite my resolution previously always to brew alone, I invited him over to help me out. Turned out fine.

I wanted to try out some of the techniques and ideas I have gotten reading Designing Great Beers, and I had just harvested hops, so I thought I'd try making a fresh hop IPA. I had originally intended to use more grain than extract, but to simplify things and reduce the amount of new equipment I would have to buy, I decided to go about 1/3 grain and 2/3 extract. I bought about 4 pounds of Pale Malt, 1/2 pound of 60L Crystal Malt, a vial of California Ale yeast, a kitchen scale, and some bottling equipment at the brew store, along with a couple sacks of dry malt extract (instead of the goo in a can).

I have to say, the dry extract is so much easier to work with than canned. I won't be looking back on that decision, that's for sure. No waste, easily dissolved, precise measurements on the scale. Enough said.

I have never mashed this much grain before. For that matter, I've never properly mashed grain. I always just dumped it in while I was bringing the water to a boil, then scooped it out before the boil, Papazian-style.

This time, I measured out (!) 5 quarts of water (1 quart per pound, plus another because it looked like it needed it), brought it to 172 degrees in the brew pot, added the grain, and used the oven on a low setting to maintain the mash at around 150 degrees for about 30 minutes or so.

After that, I dumped the mash into a grain bag inside my bottling bucket, ran off the liquor, added 3 more quarts of hot water and ran that off, and ended up with 9 quarts or so of wort with about 53 gravity units! That's sweet enough that it could have been beer after boiling! I could easily go all grain!

I chose, at this point, to ignore my carefully calculated figures about how much extract to add, which was, of course, stupid. I added 4.75 pounds of dry extract, which should have brought the final gravity to about 72 gravity units (my target was 65). After boiling, including 3 additions of hops, one of which was fresh hops, I ended up with a final gravity of about 85 GU! I was blown away. I'm still not able to figure out where the extra sugar came from, unless the brew store gave me more malt than I asked for.

I pitched the yeast at about 75 degrees, and it's just starting to blow foam out of the hose today, 2 and a half days later. I'll have to be more patient with this beer than I have with the others. It will take 6 weeks or more to be ready to drink, and even then, I anticipate it being immature.

This was an exciting batch of beer, becuase I'm just that much closer to being able to brew with less extract and more grain.

I've been getting a lot of compliments on both the Honey Cream Ale and the Smoked Rye Porter lately. Hopefully this latest batch will be even better (enough to be worth the extra bother).