Oberon Clone

We're in Florida now, and Spring is here. It's already pretty warm and feeling like Summer. Luckily, Bell's Brewery brews their Summer beer, Oberon Ale, year-round for Florida. It's a light, refreshing, citrusy wheat beer that we both love to drink outside. I found a clone recipe online and decided to give it a shot.

It was a smooth brew day that started pretty early. I was able to get the grains crushed and my water measured out the night before, so the brew day was very smooth. I actually bought extra ice to assist in the cooling process and with the extra cold water in my immersion chiller, I probably shaved 10-15 minutes off of my day and cooled my beer down to 60 quite easily.

This one will probably end up around 6% and we'll dry hop it with Saaz for some herbal/spicy notes, and then a good amount of Cascade to help provide the citrus aromas. It should be ready in a couple of weeks.

In other news, we're drinking the pale ales and they are both tasting pretty good. Most people so far are preferring the American version (myself included), but I think the Belgian just needs a little more time to mellow out. I am hoping to post some tasting notes, and I'm off this weekend, so we'll see.

New Digs

Finally got around to making our first batch of beer in Tampa. It's been a busy month since we got here, and we are officially out of beer on tap. Seeing as though the kegerator was empty I came up with the idea to brew 10 gallons and use the kegerator as another fermentation fridge. I wanted to do a Pale Ale and Elise came up with the idea to split the batch and use 2 different yeasts. We haven't done a Belgian Pale Ale in forever, so we did 5 gallons with Belgian yeast and 5 gallons with American.

It was a relatively smooth brew day, some of the equipment was still in boxes, but other than that my table worked great and there weren't any hiccups in the garage. The ground water is a lot warmer in Tampa, so I will need to start getting more ice for the chilling phase, but that shouldn't be too big of an issue.

I will dry the American Pale with 2 oz of Citra hop which will be a new one for us. I am going to dry hop in primary, as opposed to the keg, as I think some of the off flavors were actually coming from the bags I was using to hold the hops in the kegs. We'll see. I'll be kegging on Thursday and hopefully we'll be able to drink some early samples on Saturday in time for the Final Four.

Recipe
18 lbs 2-row
1.7 lb CaraPils
1.3 lb C40
0.2 lb C60

1 oz CTZ at 60
2 oz Cascade at 20
1 oz Cascade at 10
2 oz Citra + 1 oz Cascade at 5 min

Dry Hop (American) 2 oz Citra