Author Archives: Chris

Red Ale + Gluten Free Pilsener

We’re on a roll now.

This past Sunday was an shining example of hyper efficient brewing. After the Speculative IPA, we opted for a more traditional route to use up what’s remaining in the granary, and plumped for a Red Ale (mostly at Sally’s request).

We took advantage of the 60 minute mash to bottle the week before last’s Speculative IPA, and during the boil we did a cheeky Gluten Free Pilsner for Alex. When we did our last beer, we were concerned that we cooled the wort too much before topping it up to 20L with cold water. So this time we made sure to top up when the wort was around 45C, which meant that we were able to pitch the yeast for the Red Ale at a relatively warm 20C or so.

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The particulars
Sally’s Red Ale
Grains: Vienna Malt, Cara-Pils, Aromatic Malt, Roasted Barley
Hops: East Kent Goldings (60 + 30 min)
Yeast: Irish Ale Yeast (WLP004)
OG: 1.048
FG: We’ll see…

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Speculative IPA

You know where this is from.

You know where this is from.

UPDATE: 11 December – we bottled this over the weekend with an FG of 1.015. It tastes great already…

So after the debacle of the autumn ale that never was (the less said, the better), it was decided to move on to pastures anew. After an interlude of brewing an old faithful, in the form of a White House Honey Porter partial mash out of a box, we decided to try and use up some of what was contained in what Andrew dubbed ‘the granary’.

So we had some chocolate malt. Some Special B, whatever the hell that actually is, some pale malt, some other stuff. You get the picture. This is where Beersmith came to our rescue. For a few squid we can now design recipes, and thus achieve spectacular brewing failures with lighting like efficiency. We really liked the Hopfather Double IPA we put together earlier this year, so we thought we’d combine the hop-pocalypse aspect of that with our surfeit of chocolate malt and put together an IPA. And because it’s our first bespoke recipe, it’s a ‘Speculative IPA’.

While there was some concern that we may have over-cooled the wort before topping up, the apocalyptic level of krausen a mere 12 hours later certainly put paid to that.

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Here’s the particulars:

Speculative IPA
Grains: Munich, Pale Malt, Carafa 1, Chocolate, Special B
Hops: Chinook (60 min), Cascade, Magnum (30 min), Goldings (15 min), Goldings, Chinook (Dry hop – if I can be arsed)
Yeast: American Ale II (Wyeast #1272)
OG: 1.050
FG: 1.015

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Bottling the Autumn Ale

Well after three weeks of London’s hottest weather in many years, it was definitely time to bottle our Autumn Ale.  I try and see as many things as possible as ‘teachable moments’, and I think that this brew has certainly been one of them. Since October 2011, Andrew, Sam and I have done around 10-15 (feels like more) brews, and we’ve never really had a bad one. There have been rather, ahem, explosive, bottles from time to time, but the actual beer has been drinkable, i.e. not vinegar.

This one, however, was a bit different. Three weeks in my front room, interacting with the sun and some enterprising fruit flies left our ale tasting rather sour out of the fermenter. Still, we went ahead with bottling,  and if it’s more fool us come November, then so be it. Final gravity was 1.015/16, which isn’t all that far off the predicted 1.014, so that’s something we can be happy about at the very least. I think a new fermenter with an airlock will be purchased in the near future to prevent any further fruit fly subsidy.

Here’s some pictorial highlights of the bottling, photos mostly courtesy of Michael Hallet:

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Once the weather has returned to being more typically British (i.e. bloody cold and wet), we’ll be returning to brewing  – this time we’ll be going gluten free.

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Brewing an Autumn ale in the high summer

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This being Britain, even in the heights of summer we had autumn on our minds, so decided to settle upon an autumn ale. Well, not quite an autumn ale. After sampling a couple of darker wheat ales at the relative debacle that was the Reading beer festival back in May (a story for another time), Andrew and I settled upon having a crack at making one ourselves. A bit of Googling found a partial mash of this recipe from deepest Japan of all places, which looked like it would do.

So last weekend, the standard Ealing Heights brew crew of myself, Andrew and Sam (of ‘ounslow fame) gathered at our new (well, to us), flat along with brewing newbies Tim from Wales and Michael from Tokoroa (we try not to talk about that to be honest). Beforehand, I decided that we had to fill the monotonous hour(s) where the mash was steeping and the boil was boiling with something – so hit upon the idea of a ‘Brew-bq’. Naffly named I know, but certainly a hit with the punters.

This brew recipe looks to be a bit of a special one, as it involved about a pound of roasted oatmeal – Sainbury’s finest. We’ve used oatmeal before to great effect  so we’re hoping for similar results this time around. I’ll spare you the boring bits of what we did and when, but the highlights were that we had some interesting logistics with sparging nearly 4 kgs of grain with a relative dearth of equipment, and that we gave the yeast an extra ‘push’ with half a kg of brewing sugar we had knocking around. OG was 1.060, which if it gets down towards the predicted FG of 1.014 (ish) we should have a nice beer 5.5% beer sometime in October.

The only slight wrinkle has been that while the yeast has been doing its thing for most of the week, it’s been the hottest few days of the summer. What that will mean for the beer, I have no idea. It may end up being called ‘Hot living room beer’ at this rate. But we’ll see.

What went well

  • Combining a four hour brew with a barbecue. Meat and beer-making, yum!

What didn’t

  • Sparging 4 kgs of grains – it’s very difficult to get all of the runnings over all of the grains without spilling some of either. We might have to look at some kind of siphoning process in the future.
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