Brown Ale

Today was a quick brew (less than 4 hours from start to finish) and we made our Brown Ale again. This is now the 5th time we've made this recipe and the only thing that changed this time was a substitue of Columbus hops for Chinook at the 60 minute addition. Both are high alpha hops (creating similar IBUs) and I doubt we'll be able to tell the difference. We'll dry hop this with 0.5 oz each of Centennial and Columbus and will keg this beer hopefully in about 4 weeks.

After the snow storm dumped 15" of snow over the weekend I had plenty of snow to use with our immersion chiller and was able to cool the beer down very quickly. Normally, we use about 16-20 gallons of water to cool a batch down (we save 11 gallons by using a 5- and 6-gallon carboy to store water until the next brew). However, today we only needed about 10 gallons before the beer was chilled to about 65 F.



As usual, the dogs received a bit of grain to munch on.



Next week we plan on making our First Snow Winter Ale followed up in a couple of weeks with a Steam Beer. Both of these beers will use the California Lager yeast from the Schwarzbier batch. We will secondary the Schwarz the day before we brew the Snow in order to get the yeast. I am also leaning towards getting 2 more kegs so that we can keg the Schwarz and properly lager it in the fridge until we serve it in the end of May. Hopefully by then we'll have a couple of taps going and will also have the Steam on tap with the Schwarz as we planned on drinking these on the weekend of Cooper's baptism.