Brown Ale

The brown is now quietly fermenting away in its new home in the garage: a swamp cooler. With the summer heat comes much higher temperatures in our garage, and anything over 70 degrees is too hot for beer. During the winter, our garage is usually in the low to mid 50’s which is too cold for ales, but just inside the door to our house, it is in the low 60’s which is perfect for fermenting ales. To deal with these warm temperatures in the summer we have to make a swamp cooler, basically a large bucket of water that the beer sits in. We add ice packs to the water and drape a t-shirt over the bucket to take advantage of evaporative cooling. We can usually bring the ambient temperature down about 10 degrees which isn’t as cold as I would ideally have it, but close enough. Some day we will be getting a refrigerator to put in the garage specifically for fermentation, but sadly, it won’t be soon enough.


As for the brown ale, it was one of the easiest, least stressful brew days that either one of us can remember. After doing the 8 gallon 90 minute boil Wit last week, this 5 gallon 60 minute boil seemed to go very smoothly and quickly. The OG was 1064, and this beer should be about 6% alcohol. This is our first time using an American strain of yeast on a brown ale, last time we used an Irish ale yeast, and this actual yeast will be used again and again throughout the summer. In 2 weeks we will use most of the yeast on an Imperial Stout, and then the rest will be used later for an IPA and a porter. Next week’s pale ale is going to be a split between American and Belgian yeast. The American yeast will come from the red ale that will be bottled on Saturday, and the Belgian is a strain that we have had in the fridge for a few months now that was taken from a previous Belgian IPA batch. That same barch of yeast is also going to be used a lot this summer in our Belgian Dark Strong Ale, Belgian Dubbel, Belgian Tripel, and we are going to try throwing Belgian yeast onto our spiced Christmas ale this summer.