New Macka’s brewing web pages

I’ve started a seperate sub-domain for my brewing web pages,

All of my brewing posts and articles can now be found at

http://brew.mackaonline.com

My other pages are still at

http://www.mackaonline.com

Cheers

MACA

Follow-up Perle Amber Ale

Well my Perle Amber ale has been kegged and gassed.

I tasted it last night, needs a bit more gas, but initial thoughts
• Little sweet, could have used more bittering hops, but this may improve with more gas
• Nice heavy style - the type I like - beer with caramel type flavours
• Perle hops probably don’t really suit this style, might be better in a lighter pale ale
• Maybe could have left out the Crystal Malt…

All in all my comments above are a bit on the negative side, but that’s because I’m fussy, it really is a nice beer, and I’m going to enjoy it over the winter months (i.e. right now!!)

Related Posts

Perle Amber Ale 3rd June 2007

Light Brown Ale recipe

Just thought I’d post another older recipe of mine that I enjoy

This was a throw together brew that turned out quite nice, I’ve found it a nice after work beer, that you can enjoy having a few of with out getting too inebriated.

 Once again I’ve just included the promash recipe print out

 light brown ale

A ProMash Recipe Report

BJCP Style and Style Guidelines
——————————-

10-B  Brown Ale, Northern Brown

Min OG:  1.040   Max OG:  1.050
Min IBU:    15   Max IBU:    30
Min Clr:    12   Max Clr:    30  Color in SRM, Lovibond

Recipe Specifics
—————-

Batch Size (L):          35.00    Wort Size (L):     35.00
Total Grain (kg):         6.60
Anticipated OG:          1.043    Plato:             10.75
Anticipated SRM:          10.7
Anticipated IBU:          21.6
Brewhouse Efficiency:       75 %
Wort Boil Time:             60    Minutes

Pre-Boil Amounts
—————-

Pre-Boil Wort Size:   41.18    L
Pre-Boil Gravity:      1.037    SG          9.19  Plato

Grain/Extract/Sugar

   %     Amount     Name       Potential SRM
—————————————————————————–
 90.9     6.00 kg.  JWM Export Pilsner 1.037      2
  7.6     0.50 kg.  Amber Malt      1.032     35
  1.5     0.10 kg.  Chocolate Malt   1.034    475
Hops

   Amount     Name     Form    Alpha  IBU  Boil Time
—————————————————————————–
 25.00 g.     Pride of Ringwood     Pellet   9.20  21.6  60 min.

Yeast
DCL Yeast S-04 SafAle English Ale

If you try this recipe please leave a comment and let me know how you found it

Related posts

 bavarian lager 9th June ‘07

My Favourite brew so far 

perle amber ale 3rd June ‘07

Bavarian Lager? 9th June ‘07

 Well I had a chance to do another brew on Saturday and as I said I would in my post Perle Amber ale 3^rd June I dropped the new brew straight onto the yeast cake from that brew. 

Once again I’ve been pushed for time and my ‘kettle’ is still out of action so I’ve just done an extract brew to save a bit of time.

Ingredients:

• Coopers Bavarian Lager Kit,
• 1 kg light dry malt extract,
• 500grams generic brand honey (not looking for honey flavours, just wanted to lighten the body of the beer),
• 200 grams crystal malt (colour 140 EBC),
• 25 grams Saaz Hops (pellets)

Method:

This brewing session was much the same as my Perle Pale ale, so I’ll not go into too much detail on the brewing of it.

Put Crystal malt (crushed) into 2 litres of water and start heating until it just starts to boil (can even be stopped just before this stage) and strain into the main pot when ready, this can occur at anytime during the preparation of the main wort.

Heat up another 5 litres of water and add the Coopers Bavarian lager kit, Dry malt extract, Put hops into a ‘hop bag’ and the honey and bring to the boil.

I’ve used a “hop bag” this time mainly as the hops were in pellet form, using whole hops I find I don’t really need to use the hop bag as the hop flowers form quite a good filter by themselves and don’t release too many small particles.

Once the wort boils take immediately off the heat cover and place into a larger container of cold water to cool it a little.

While the wort is cooling, transfer the current brew into another ‘barrel’ or other suitable container for secondary fermentation, fill newly emptied fermenter with approximately 15 litres of cold water, squirting it in under pressure to stir up the yeast cake at the bottom of the barrel and also forcing some extra oxygen into the water which helps the yeast get going, add the wort (which will be still quite warm to hot), the temperature hopefully will stabilise around 16-18˚C which is a good starting temperature for a lager. Top up the fermenter to 24-25litres and take a SG reading

Should be around 1.050

As the brew has been put onto an existing yeast cake, fermentation will become visible very quickly, most likely there will be a strong fermentation within 45 minutes, I would strongly recommend that you do not use this method with a very heavy beer and an ale yeast, such as a stout, as the fermentation will be so strong that it is likely the beer with attempt to ‘crawl’ out of the airlock, using this method with lager yeast at low temperatures usually keeps this under control a little (although I have had a lager crawl out of the airlock once before gravity of 1.065)

The next morning I found the fermentor had cooled nicely to 12˚C  so it was time to put into my “fermentation chamber”, actually an old refrigerator, which works really well at this time of year to hold the temperatures stable i.e. The heat losses from the refrigerator=the heat generated by the yeast.

Although I won’t need it for this brew, I have set the refrigerator up with a temperature sensor, so I can turn on the compressor if I need to remove some heat in summer or for lagering, or turn on a small light bulb mounted inside, which can be used for heating. I’ll go into detail on how this is controlled thought a Linux PC I have running in the shed in another post.

This beer should actually have quite a rapid fermentation due to the very large number of starting yeast cells from the previous beer, I suspect it will be finished fermentation in about 5 days rather than the 10 I usually expect for lagers at low temperatures.

Looks like next weekend is a bottling or kegging weekend

My Favourite Brew so far

This is just a quick post with the recipe of my favourite brew so far.

It’s an adaption of a Duvel copy recipe I was sent some time ago, one day I did not have the time to make some candi-sugar for the brew, So I had some honey and decided they were all sugars, I’d try it with Honey instead, the result was a Belgian Golden strong ale style, with very nice Subtle Honey flavours, I recommend this recipe for anyone who likes the stronger Belgian style beers!!

Recipe export from ProMash

Duvel Copy with Honey

A ProMash Recipe Report

BJCP Style and Style Guidelines
——————————-

18-C  Strong Belgian Ale, Belgian Strong Golden Ale

Min OG:  1.065   Max OG:  1.080
Min IBU:    25   Max IBU:    35
Min Clr:     4   Max Clr:     6  Color in SRM, Lovibond

Recipe Specifics
—————-

Batch Size (L):          23.00    Wort Size (L):     23.00
Total Grain (kg):         6.90
Anticipated OG:          1.071    Plato:             17.31
Anticipated SRM:           8.7
Anticipated IBU:          30.9
Brewhouse Efficiency:       75 %
Wort Boil Time:             90    Minutes

Pre-Boil Amounts
—————-

Evaporation Rate:      15.00    Percent Per Hour
Pre-Boil Wort Size:   29.68    L
Pre-Boil Gravity:      1.055    SG          13.59  Plato

Formulas Used
————-

Brewhouse Efficiency and Predicted Gravity based on Method #1, Potential Used.
Final Gravity Calculation Based on Points.
Hard Value of Sucrose applied. Value for recipe: 46.2100 ppppg
Yield Type used in Gravity Prediction: Fine Grind Dry Basis.

Color Formula Used:   Morey
Hop IBU Formula Used: Rager

Additional Utilization Used For Plug Hops:         2 %
Additional Utilization Used For Pellet Hops:      10 %
Grain/Extract/Sugar

   %     Amount     Name                          Origin        Potential SRM
—————————————————————————–
  2.9     0.20 kg.  Crystal 105L                  Great Britain  1.033    105
 10.1     0.70 kg.  Clover Honey                  Generic        1.035      0
 87.0     6.00 kg.  Pale Ale Malt (2-row)         Australia      1.037      2

Potential represented as SG per pound per gallon.
Hops

   Amount     Name                              Form    Alpha  IBU  Boil Time
—————————————————————————–
 70.00 g.     Czech Saaz                        Pellet   3.30  30.9  70 min.
 12.00 g.     Czech Saaz                        Pellet   3.30   0.0  0 min.
Extras

  Amount      Name                           Type      Time
————————————————————————–
  0.50 Unit(s)Irish Moss                     Fining    15 Min.(boil)
Yeast
—–

WYeast 1388 Belgian Strong Ale

Mash Schedule
————-

Mash Type: Single Step

Grain kg:     6.20
Water Qts:   12.70 - Before Additional Infusions
Water L:     12.02 - Before Additional Infusions

L Water Per kg Grain: 1.94 - Before Additional Infusions

Saccharification Rest Temp :   0  Time:   0
Mash-out Rest Temp :          68  Time:  90
Sparge Temp :                 80  Time:  20
Total Mash Volume L: 16.16 - Dough-In Infusion Only

All temperature measurements are degrees Celsius.

Perle Amber Ale 3rd June 2007

I finally had a chance to do a brew using my own home grown perle hops.
Last years harvest was lost to an infection in my brewing equipment to the point I threw out my 2 fermenters and purchased three new fermenters, as I lost a couple of brews and could not find the source, so assumed it was from the old fermenters (one was around 12 years old).I did not have time to do an “All Grain” brew so I purchased some malt extract from my local Home Brew store (with new owners - so I thought I’d help out and purchase from them).

Ingredients:

• 1.5kg Black Rock Amber Malt Liquid extract (only because they had no pale extract left)
• 1kg Light Dry Malt extract
• 400ml Glucose syrup (only because it was in the cupboard and I wanted to get rid of it)
• 400grams Crystal malt (80L I think) to add some body to the beer (probably way too much crystal)

The hops were added as approximates only, for 2 reasons
1. I don’t know the alpha-acid content so no point measuring any way
2. My small scales are broken so I had no choice

• 40grams 60mins Perle Whole hop flowers
• 20grams 12 mins Perle Whole hop flowers
• 15grams 1min Perle Whole hop flowers
• Packet of SAFLAGER dry yeast (temp range 11-15˚C - good for winter as the current temps here are a max of 15˚C with lows of 5˚C)

Method:
Heat 2 pots of water
Main pot 15litres water
Grain pot (just a smaller pot) 2.5litres

Added grain immediately to the smaller pot, to extract the malt slowly as the water heated so not too much of the grain tannins get into the brew, and it was easier to do the grain separately rather than trying to strain 20 litres of hot wort later to get the spent grains out.

Add Amber malt to main pot when it was starting to get close to boiling, boiled a kettle and rinsed the amber malt tin out with boiling water into the main pot.
Added dry light malt to main pot (dry malt is great but a little painful to dissolve, I usually don’t worry about it too much as once the wort boils it soon dissolves)

Stir the grain now and then to stop the grain burning at the bottom of the pot

When the main pot begins to boil (takes awhile with only small stove elements - did I mention my normal ‘wort kettle’ is out of action, needs a new tap as I had to steal it to fix one in the house) add 40 grams of hops and allow to boil for ~38 mins.

Ensure you keep stirring the grain pot, once it reaches almost boiling, strain into main pot and rinse grains with hot water to get all of the good stuff out.

This causes the main pot to stop boiling, but it soon came back to the boil

Add 20 grams of hops

Continue the boil for 10-11 mins then add the last of the hops
Turn off the stove

Put lid on the pot and put pot in large container of cold water, leave for 15 mins
Check temperature of the water - it may heat up considerably,
change the water with more cold water if it does get too warm (~25˚C),
leave for around 45 mins, change water again.

Sterilise fermenter with “one-shot” acid based steriliser or your preferred steriliser, and rinse with hot water (not really necessary with one-shot but I like to do it anyway)

Put 5 litres of cold water into fermenter with garden hose at high pressure - to try get a bit more oxygen into the water, as most of the dissolved oxygen in the boiled wort will be gone.

Strain wort into fermenter (stainless pasta sieve works well), then add water to 24litres (once again at high pressure for aeration).
Check temp - 18˚C - perfect!!!
Take SG reading - 1.050

Rehydrate yeast in 100ml luke-warm water (24˚C) for 15 mins add to fermentor

Put lid on with airlock and put into old broken refrigerator to help keep temperatures more constant

Fermentation was a little slow starting - about 24hours before a krausen started forming (froth on top of brew) but for a lager yeast I’ve found this quite normal
So now we’ll see how it goes

———————————————–

I intend to do another brew on the coming weekend, and what I’ll do is rack the current brew to another fermenter to finish it off, and drop the new beer onto the active yeast cake in the 1st fermenter, there will be so much active yeast in the yeast cake the new beer should start fermenting strongly within hours, from experience I will not be putting a heavy wort onto this yeast cake, I’ve had too many ferment so actively that it ‘crawls’ out of the airlock, even at temps as low as 10˚C!!!

Stay tuned for postings of previous sucessful recipes and of course new brews….