The red ale was a normal 5 gallon batch, and Elise wrote the recipe for and designed a label for it which can be seen on our website. It should be ready right around the time Shark Week on the Discovery Channel begins and the beer is aptly named Shark Week Red Ale. This is a “low gravity” beer for us, especially Elise, who has a hard time letting me brew anything under 6% alcohol. This one should clock in at about 5.4-5.6% depending on the attenuation.
It had been awhile since our last brew session and it definitely took a while to get back into the swing of things. We missed our mash temperature by a couple of degrees, but that was not the biggest problem of the day. Our mash tun has a braid on the inside that is supposed to filter and drain the wort from the grain. Usually the braids are made out of stainless steel and come from washing machine hook ups, but I made a mistake and accidentally bought one that was made out of a polymer. This polymer lacked the strength of its stainless steel counterpart, and as a result would collapse under the weight of the grain and not allow efficient flow. Needless to say, it took us almost an hour and some unorthodox methods to lauter our wort into the kettle and we ended up losing about 1/3-1/2 a gallon of beer because of this. The rest of the day went smoothly, and we finished the beer without any problems. We bottled an American pale ale (a neighbor’s beer whom we had shown how to brew a few weeks prior) in the morning during the mash and used the yeast from the pale ale batch to ferment the red ale. Reusing yeast not only saves money (it is about $7 for each “unit” of yeast) but the beer actually prefers used yeast. The yeast are healthier and since they are used immediately the fermentation starts much quicker resulting in a more attenuative fermentation.
When we finished we went to Home Depot to build a new braid for our mash tun. Elise found a stainless steel braid and we changed the inlet on the inside of the cooler to match the braid a little better. We were worried because the Belgian was going to be harder to lauter because of the high percentage of wheat malt and oats in the grist, and we wanted to make sure that it didn’t take us 2 hours to collect our wort.
Sunday morning comes, and we add our strike water, and again we missed our mash temp by a couple of degrees; 2 degrees higher this time, compared to the red where we missed on the low end. This was an 8 gallon batch and we had 21.6 lbs of grain. Our cooler was almost overflowing and we made quite a mess in the garage stirring the mash spilling wort and grains onto the ground. Luckily, Riley has found a new love in eating grain, so she was able to clean most of it up.
This mash smelled and tasted completely different from any beer we had done in the past. Since no caramel malts were added to the beer (the SRM only at 4), this is to date our lightest colored beer by far. Usually the grains are very sweet and sugary, but this mash was quite the opposite. It had the consistency of cereal and was extremely grainy, but not too sweet.
Because of such a light color and lack of roasted malts, the pH of the mash would be much higher if we used our normal water. To combat this, we used distilled water to cut our home water, along with the addition of brewing salts. Out of the total 11 gallons of water that went into the beer, only 40% was actual tap water. Because of the large amount of wheat malt and oats in the beer, we also added rice hulls to help with the lautering process. Rice hulls do not add any flavor, color, or sugar to the beer, but are used simply as an additional filter in the grain bed to prevent a stuck sparge (they don’t taste very good either). When it came time to lauter, we were both very nervous to see if our new braid actually worked, and to our surprise it worked like a champ. We drained about 5.5 gallons of first runnings out of the mash tun in about 10 minutes, and had similar success with the sparge. Having this process run so smoothly should save us about 20 minutes on a brew day compared to ones before we re-did the braid. You can see in the picture below how fast the wort was draining out of the lauter tun.
The boil went smoothly, and we used Hallertauer hops for the first time, along with 1.5 oz’s each of coriander and bitter orange peel. Hallertauer are noble hops from Europe and are not cheap, but are very important ingredients in certain styles of beer. The Hallertauer hops smelled completely different from any of the hops we have used in the past. Usually, the American style hops we buy smell very citrusy, fruity, and/or grassy. Here is a websites take on one of our favorite hops, Centennial. But the Hallertauer smelled quite earthy and spicy (the website’s take on Hallertauer hops).
We had originally planned to have the beer have an original gravity of about 1060ish (about 6% alcohol), but our efficiency was higher than expected and we ended up with about 8 gallons at 1069 (closer to 7% alcohol). I guess we are going to find out what an Imperial Wit tastes like.
Both beers will more than likely be bottled around the 26th, and hopefully ready to drink in about 4 to 6 weeks.
Next up, an American Brown Ale...
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