You don't wanna why it's 'Cream Ale'

Since we have been brewing a lot of really big and complex beers the last few times out, we decided to lighten things up a little and go for a Cream Ale. If you have been reading for a few months you'll remember that I did a vanilla cream ale (no link because I think I did not blog about this one...interesting, I am brewing so much I forget beers)this summer and was really pleased with the outcome. This time we are going for a more simple brew and we are going to cold store it for a few weeks secondary.

The recipe is pretty straight forward:

You don't wanna why it's 'Cream Ale'
Brewer: Travis&Nick
Asst Brewer: Meatball
Style: Cream Ale
TYPE: All Grain

Recipe Specifications
--------------------------
Batch Size: 10.00 gal
Boil Size: 12.55 gal
Estimated OG: 1.040 SG
Estimated Color: 4.1 SRM
Estimated IBU: 15.3 IBU
Brewhouse Efficiency: 59.0 %
Boil Time: 60 Minutes

Ingredients:
------------
Amount Item
14.00 lb Pale Malt (2 Row) US (2.0 SRM) 74.7 %
3.00 lb Corn, Flaked (1.3 SRM) 16.0 %
1.00 lb Caramel/Crystal Malt - 10L (10.0 SRM) 5.3 %
0.75 lb Cara-Pils/Dextrine (2.0 SRM) 4.0 %
1.50 oz Saaz [4.00%] (60 min) 12.2 IBU
0.50 oz Saaz [4.00%] (30 min) 3.1 IBU
1 Pkgs Kolsch Yeast (Wyeast Labs #2565) (Yeast Cake from Kolsch)

Mash Schedule: Single Infusion, Full Body
Total Grain Weight: 18.75 lb
----------------------------
Name Description
Mash In Add 5.86 gal of water at 170.5 F158.0 F 45 min
Mash Out Add 2.34 gal of water at 196.6 F168.0 F 10 min

The plan is to fly sparge on this one, flying in the face of the advice from Ted :-) Honestly I have a hard on for fly sparging because I have never done it, I need to get over that hump before I can move on and make an educated decision about which I prefer. (Are the perverse overtones of this post too blatant?)

More info after the weekend brew session...cheers!

PS- Check out my buddy Ben's revamped website. Great upgrade. Ben was the inspiration for my "tap and box" project that is holding my beer at a comfortable 49f! Thanks Ben.

The second beer fridge project

After the success (eventually) of the beer fridge I made with a dorm fridge and a cold plate, Nick decided he was ready to make the plunge into kegging and wanted one himself.

For this project, Nick had a bigger dorm fridge than I had previously used. The fridge that he used looked like a 4.6 cu. ft. fridge where mine was a 1.7 cu. ft. fridge. This will allow him to also store beer, yeast and any other items in it he wants to keep cold in addition to the cold plate.



The setup was very similar to what I had setup before the box and tap which is what I am currently using. The plan was simple; hole in the front of the fridge for 1/2in spur and tap, hose to cold plate, house out of cold plate, house out of fridge to keg, hose from keg to CO2. Pretty simple.

We started with the small hole from the keg into the fridge.



Sorry about the crappy photo. The hole was in the lower part of the fridge near where the motor is. This is a pretty convenient place to drill as long as you are careful. However, it doesn't really matter where you drill with this size fridge because the colling element is the freezer, no freon in the walls like a large fridge.

From here we hooked up the CO2 and ran the line through to the cold plate.



He got the tubes, gages and CO2 tank from EJ Wren. Finally we drilled the hole through the front of the fridge using my handy dandy step drill bit. After we screwed in the tap and ran the hose, we were all done. Easy enough.

Nick said that the system has been working perfectly. He lucked out and was able to tweak the CO2 pressure so that there were no aggressive foam issues.

Again, sorry about the bad pics, next time I will get a real camera, not my camera phone.

Cheers!

Tweaking my bru wear

So the title is in reference to the Wu Tang Clan and the Wu Wear they made famous. Though I am am not a crazy Wu fan, I do appreciate their shaolin style, but I digress.

This weekend I spent doing some "fixer uppers" on my brew house. While all this was going on, I kicked the Pumpkin Ale and the Brown Ale. Both will be missed, but the dobblebock is now on tap and that is worth writing about. This post is going to be a mishmash of my projects and drinking so away we go.

Mash Tun

First off, after all of the problems I had with the mash tun, I knew it was time for some adjustments. The way that the false bottom had previously worked was a barbed nut going to a very short piece of rubber hose, from there a small piece of copper slid into a hole in the 1/2in copper tubing that made up the false bottom.

The plan to improve this was to was to create a more permanent connection from the false bottom to the ball lock valve. I started by moving the location of where the liquid exits the false bottom.

As pictured, I relocated the exit point of the runoff from the front of the false bottom to the center. This was to allow me to runner full copper with soldering from the false bottom to the ball valve.

From here, I created a connection from the ball valve to the newly relocated false bottom exit point. For this, I used a 1/2in copper fitting nut and a piece of 1/2in copper pipe. I connected the copper tube to a copper corner piece with solder to create a permanent connection. I did not solder the connection from the corner piece to the false bottom because I wanted to maintain some wiggle room.

In the end, I had a new connection between the ball lock and the false bottom that could still be taken out of the mash tun and properly cleaned.

Sparge Arm...One more time

So after my many, many failed attempts at building a sparge arm that would work, I think I have have something now. In the process of creating a successful sparge arm, I still managed to fail at an attempt to save the previous copper sparge arm that did not work because of the hose. In the long term though, i established that a hanging sparge arm would not work because we are now brewing 10 gallon batches and there is not as much room in the mash tun there once was.

As you can see in the picture below, I attempted to make the copper sparge arm a floating sparge arm instead of the hanging sparge arm it currently is. This was a failed attempt. The foam that I used to make it float was glued on, but the glue did not hold and got all over the copper. There was not saving it.




Starting with a clear slate, I decided to use my bottling bucket for the reservoir, high temp hose to run the water from the reservoir to the sparge arm, and PVC pipe for the actual sparge arm. With the bottling bucket, I had to get a 3/4 ball valve and i used the plastic nut from the bottling setup to secure the ball valve into the bucket. I used 5/8 in inside diameter hot water hose that is rated at boiling temp for the hose. I used barbed nuts for the connection to the ball valve and the connection from the new PVC sparge arm.



Finally I made the sparge arm out of PVC with small holes in it. It's pretty simple, a square with holes in it that goes to a T. PVC is cheaper and easier to work with than copper, I wish I had done this originally. It doesn't float above the water, but it should sit on top of the gain bed without sinking and slowly disburse water. The ball valve is clutch here because you can adjust the flow with relative ease.

In the end, this is what I have:



Beer

So now a quick update on my brewing situation. I have a Kolsch and the Yeti clone both in secondary. The Yeti was way too much on the oak side, this concurs with Nick's opinion that splitting the full pound for the 6 gallon batch was overkill. I would have to say that his opinion that we would be good with an ounce in each primary fermenter was correct.

Because of the overwhelming flavor on the yeti and the fact that I lost some quantity, I decided to top the yeti off in the secondary with about two quarts to a 1/2 gallon of water. Hopefully this take some of the extreme flavor off this brew. Otherwise it is close to undrinkable.

The kolsh is good, but cloudy. There was a lot of stuff still floating around. I topped this one off with water in the secondary as well. Currently it's still bubbling in the carboy so I think that I may need to cold store this one for a while to clear it out.



Finally I have my dopplebock on tap now and my red ale still waiting to fully carbonate. The dopplebock is OUTSTANDING. It's totally smooth. All of the roasty malt flavors are really smoothed over during the lagering process. This makes the whole experience really enjoyable. there is no alcohol burn on this brew at all and it about 7% abv, that's pretty impressive.

As you can see, great color, great head retention. I am very happy with how this turned out. It makes the wait all very worth while.

Since I kicked the pumpkin and the brown ale, I think it's time for a brew day!

Cheers

Hops of wrath

So far I have seen a lot of conversation about the hops shortage and what it is going to mean to brewers, both home and craft. Ted offered up a great post on pricing which spun into an ongoing conversation about how the hops shortage will affect us as homebrewers.

I'll admit, at first I figured that it would only mean a jack up in price and I would suck it up and brew on. However, it's much worse than I could have imagined. LHBS's all over the country are rationing hops to 2oz per kind of hops you buy. I went to my LHBS and the fridge was almost bare! He said he had ordered 800oz of hops and gotten 300 of them in.

Now as homebrewers, we are going to make changes much like our older brothers (and sisters for the sake of being PC) the craft brewers. Recipes that are milder in hops and have a greater malt profile will become the norm and we will brew on. Weak and infant breweries will probably die off and the strong breweries will prevail from this shortage. For homebrewers however, I honestly can’t see it having the kind of impact regarding peoples interest as it would to a small craft brewery.

With all of that said, I would like to offer my take one the hops shortage based on what I have been reading and what I understand:

Background

The hops industry has a turbulent history to say the least. As a cash crop it is heavy on expenses and light on profit. Globally, Germany and the United States supply two thirds of all the hops. In the US, Yakima Valley is chief producer of hops supplying 70% of all domestic hops.

Traditional hops producers such as England and the Czech Republic have decreased their production over the years. England is nearly out of the business all together contributing only 2% of the global hops production.

Why the decrease in production?

In the US there has been a 30% decrease in hops production since 1995 for a verity of reasons. Yakima Valley farmers have been turning in the farms to developers who are building houses and malls due to the high cost of growing hops and the low profit margins. The once rich hops fields are attractive to the booming Yakima Valley housing and development market.

This combined with "spot buying" of hops (consists of breweries seeking out inexpensive short-term year to year deals with hop farmers instead of the three and four year contracts) has created an environment where a lot of choices are out there for hop farmers and unfortunately at this point all of them are more attractive than dealing with the instability of hops farming. Spot buying was originally a way for small microbreweries to make ends meet, but in recent years many of the larger breweries have joined in and are now paying the price.

To further the shortage there was a fire at a Yakima Valley storage facility the destroyed 110 metric tons of hops (it's a lot). Europe has had two poor harvest years due to weather ranging from severe rains to hail. All of these coupled with normal to sub-par production years in other regions has led to a perfect storm.

How is this going to affect me?

No one knows. At best, we all pay a lot more for hops for the next few years. At worst hops rationing kicks in and homebrewers will have to start scrambling for their supply. Already I have heard multiple reports that LHBS are going to be only allowing brewers to buy 2oz of any one kind of hops.

The situation is still early, but unfortunately as Ed from my LHBS said "we are the low man on the totem pole" referring to homebrewers and the priority to supply us with hops.

What's next?

Rock soup? Packing up the wagon and headed to the rich plush growing fields of California (instead of Okies, maybe they will call us 'hoppies')? Who knows (OK, so I am being a little dramatic). There are a lot of things working that at least from the outside, give the impression that there is no short-term solution to this problem. Yakima Valley has become a popular place to live and prices are going to have to really skyrocket just to keep the growers we have. The price of wheat is up at $10 a bushel now, up from $3 a few years ago and this is a much more inexpensive crop to grow compared to hops. That coupled with the allure of selling out altogether leads me to believe that there is not going to be an end to shortage anytime soon.

Unfortunately the outlook is grim. Things will have to get bad before they get better and it's not going to happen overnight. Even if it does take place and hops is suddenly a very profitable cash crop, the reason that it will be profitable is because we will be paying for it. As one might expect it will have the most noticeable impact on craft brewers as they struggle to make ends meet. This will translate to increased prices on shelves and eventually a retarding of the once booming craft brew industry.

For the last few years craft brew has been the only growth in the beer industry. In the beer production world, the yellow fizz producers have battled over market share, but seen the only growth has gone to the craft brew market (up 12%). However, this could serve as at least an anchor to slow this growth. Is it the end of the world? No, but it will be the end to a lot of breweries unfortunately.

What about us?

Well we will all need to wash the salty tears in our beer down and move on. I would recommend that if you have a LHBS and you have been shopping online for lot of things to save money, you consider going back and keeping your money close to home. After all, it’s better for the environment that mailing things halfway across the country to save a buck. LHBSs are going to have to raise prices and there will be some fall out, suck it up and keep your money close to home. The last thing on Earth you want is your LHBS to close it's doors, that would suck.

Two other important ways that we as homebrewers can help out is brew on and get other people to join! Homebrewing is fun and if there are people with money they want to spend, products and retailers will be around. Are we going to be able to supplant the current craft industries usage? No, but just keep in mind that we want people drinking good beer. Even if they don't brew it, they will buy it. Once you go craft you never go back. This will help the industry work through this turbulent time.

Sorry for the depressing post. Relax and have a homebrew. Cheers

Reference:
http://www.yakima-herald.com/page/dis/290075330547310

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,305638,00.html

http://ezinearticles.com/?Worldwide-Hop-Shortage---Will-Homebrewers-Get-Hopping-Mad-Or-Smile-Over-The-Brew-Kettle?&id=802924

Big brewing weekend

Okay, so this is not going to be a very good post for me explaining all of the ins and outs of our brew day. Instead, this is going to be more of a summary of the vitals and a quick note on the mash tun going on the fritz (for the second weekend in a row!).

So here we go.

We did two batches this weekend, a 10 gallon Kolsch and a 6 gallon Imperial Stout that was a knock off of a Great Divide Yeti clone. First off, the tale of the tape:

Kolsch - 10 gallons

16.75lb Pilsner
2.75lb Wheat Malt
1.75lb Vienna
.25lb flaked barley

Target OG was 1.045
Actual OG was 1.050

Yeast: 1000ml starter Kolsch Yeast (#2565)

Pre-boil gravity was 1.036

The Kolsh went really well, we hit our targets dead on and actually managed better than the efficiency I had made the recipe out for (normal was 59% and with the OG I think it was 68%). Since we did the two recipes in a single brew day, it was a lot of running around and a lot of on the fly scheduling of what to do when. We struck the Yeti clone with about 15min remaining on the mash of the kolsch.

Great Divide Yeti Clone - 6 gallons

16.25lb US Pale Malt
2lb Crystal 120L
1.75lb Black Patent
1.75lb Chocolate
1.60lb Roasted Barley
1.50lb Flaked Rye

Target OG was 1.088
Actual OG was 1.071

Yeast: 1/2 gallon starter of ESB and American Ale mix (there was a little Kolsh in the mix too)

Pre-boil gravity was ~1.050

Now things went a little crazy during the Yeti. The way that we worked this out was while the Kolsch was in the mash tun being sparged, we had the Yeti split up into two different coolers struck in water at 158f. The plan was to, when the kolsch was done sparging, dump the two coolers into the mashtun for mashout and sparge.

Everything went according to plan until we got the yeti grain into the mash tun. Once there, the mashtun developed a clog and would not drain any of the wort. So we did things the old fashioned way. We used a strainer and a jug to run through all the grains. We washed the grains once and were on our way (really it was a CRAZY mess that made brewing look like a monkey fucking a football, but I digress).

As you can see from the pictures below, we have a few boil overs, but we had two new brewers over so it's worth it showing them the full Monty.



How are things now?

Well as you can see from my crappy first video on CNYBrew.com, both the Yeti (on the right) and the kolsh are plugging away.

Special thanks to Taylor and Cooter for coming and allowing us to have a belated "teach a friend to brewday".

More to come this week including a post on the hops shortage.

Cheers!

**one quick note, we treated the stout with 2tbs of gypsum and 1/2tbs of baking soda. Now the bad news is that we were not able to observe any of the potential efficiency benefits because our cluster-fuck of a brewing pretty much threw efficiency out the window. The good news is that we were homebrewing, not preforming brain surgery so it's all going to be OK.

Beer Geeks Anonymous

[CNYBrew] Hi, my name is Travis and I am a beer geek

[Beer Blogosphere]Hi Travis

OK, so the first step is admitting so here I am, giving myself up.

So a while back I decided I wanted to start treating my mash for pH and taking measurements. I started to, but felt like I was not really doing anything and have since fallen off the wagon.

Now despite an outstanding explanation by Ted on pH and mash, it didn't get through my thick skull so I bailed. Today though, I woke up on a mission. I wanted to understand how and why I wanted to treat my water.

So I took a look at Ted's entry one more time, I listened to a podcast James with an interview by John Palmer on pH which he also covers in greater detail in the links I have associated with his name. I also looked back at an email I exchanged with James from Basic Brewing Radio. After all of that beer geekeyness, this is where I am:

First off, a brief overview of what is going on and why it's good to treat your mash; different regions have different water chemistry. John Palmer uses the Pilsen and Dublin regions as examples of two different water profiles. In Dublin, where stout is king, they have a highly alkaline water source.

A stout uses a lot of very dark grains that are acidic and help to counterbalance the natural alkaline water. Why are dark grains acidic? Who knows, they just are. With that said, every grain has a relative acidity or alkaline value that will contribute to the pH of the mash so a recipe combined with your water's profile will create the pH of the mash.

According to Palmer, you want to be at 5.4 to 5.8 mash pH at room temp, 5.1-5.5 mash pH at mash temp in order for optimum beta amylase conversion into fermentable sugars, thus your efficiency suffers. If the pH falls a half pH value, 5.4 at room temp to 4.9, beta amylase activity, conversion will suffer.

Brewing a stout, in water that is acidic, with the dark malts that are very acidic, it will effect your efficiency. The sugars in the wort will not be as fermentable because the pH was not in the correct range for beta amylase conversion. Also, in some cases the stout will take on a very acrid taste.

With all of that said, the long and short is that one reason for pH monitoring and adjustment is efficiency.

The second reason for pH tracking and treatment is based on the concept that the beer pH follows the mash pH. Why is that important?

Well the second example of the Pilsen region which has a much more acidic water profile, adding the grain profile of something like a stout would give you a low pH reading. This will cause you to get very dull flavor, soapy tastes, or tannin extraction depending on how high the pH is, however, it does not sound like your efficiency will be adversely effected by this.

So now that we have established that there is a reason to treat your wart and to track your pH, what do you do?

First off, get your local water report. In this there are three main parts to watch out for; calcium, magnesium, and bicarbonate concentration. I will use my Syracuse water as an example of what you are looking for:

Ontario - Calcium 31, Magnesium n/a, Sodium 17, Sulfate 27, Chloride 27, Bicarbonate n/a
Otisco - Calcium 42, Magnesium 11, Sodium 18, Sulfate 16, Chloride 36 , Bicarbonate n/a

According to the Water board, my water could be either one of these or a combination of the two. The important things to note on this is that there is moderate calcium, low magnesium and no bicarbonate. This profile would complement a pale ale pretty well. For a stout though, I am going to want to add some things to make the water more alkaline.

So now the question is what to add and how much of it do I add?

There are several additives that you can add to your mash to help balance your pH for the style brew that you are making. All of this info is available in MUCH greater detail on John Palmer's site, this is just what I took away from it.

Gypsum or Calcium- pretty universal additive for most water's -this will lower your PH

Calcium Carbonate - though there is calcium in this, the carbonate wins out and the net effect is raising your PH

Acids - They will lower the PH of your your wort-
Sulfate is supposed to be really good, but be aware of sulfate is corrosive and dangerous.
Hydrochloric Acid is good because you can get it at a pool store and most people are accustomed to using it.

OK, almost there. We have established that we want to balance the pH of the wort and we know what things other people put into their wort to achieve this balance, the question is now, how do I know how much of which stuff to put into my wort?

Well based on what I got from John's interview with James, the way to determine how much of any of the adjuncts you will need to calculate the residual alkalinity by taking the total alkalinity and subtract your effective hardness. So from here you will take the calcium concentration and divide by 3.5, magnesium concentration and divide it by 7. From here you take that quantity of effective hardness and subtract that from the alkalinity and this is your residual alkalinity.

Now I am not going to lie, I don't understand the last paragraph that I just wrote. This was based on the notes I took during the interview with John Palmer and it's a little above my pay grade.

So in a more practical sense, you can use one of the Excel spreadsheets from the links listed below that I got from Palmers website. You just punch in your amounts and it will adjust your wort accordingly. listed below that are all of the water profiles for some of the notable brew cities.

John Palmer's Excel spread sheet that makes all these calculations for you here and in metric here.

Water chemistry of classic brewing cities

Pilsen - Calcium 7, Magnesium 2, Sodium 2, Chloride 5, Sulfate 5, Alkalinity 14
Dortmund - Calcium 225, Magnesium 40, Sodium 60, Chloride 60, Sulfate 120, Alkalinity 180
Munich - Calcium 75, Magnesium 18, Sodium, 7, Chloride 10, Sulfate 10, Alkalinity 152
Vienna - Calcium 200, Magnesium 60, Sodium 8, Chloride 12, Sulfate 125, Alkalinity 120
London - Calcium 52, Magnesium 16, Sodium 99, Chloride 60, Sulfate 77, Alkalinity 156
Burton - Calcium 268, Magnesium 62, Sodium 54, Chloride 36, Sulfate 638, Alkalinity 200
Dublin - Calcium 118 , Magnesium 4, Sodium 12, Chloride 19, Sulfate 54, Alkalinity 319

Please keep in mind (assuming you took the time to read all of this) that this is my understanding of pH and it's relation to the brew process. I welcome any input from folks that know more than me (Ted I am looking in your direction) so please feel free to provide feedback.

Cheers!

Fun with beer

So Saturday morning we got up bright and early and had ourselves a great brew day. I had the water on the flame by 6:30am! Nick showed up at 7 with some Mcd's treats and we were off.

We struck the water at about 174f because we were not paying attention. Now my beer smith is always saying 170 to strike at 158f, but we are usually closer to 152 when we strike at 170. When we took the striking water off of the heat, we were climbing above 174 and just put it on. We were able to strike at exactly 158.

Beer smith also called for 9.62gal of water to strike the 26lbs+ of grain we had. This is where we ran into a problem that we have been having for a while now, the Igloo Ice Cube Cooler we have is 12 gallons and does not handle the 10 gallon batches very well. So we were only able to strike 8 1/2 gallons.

We held it for 60 min and the temp kept at between 158 and 157 for the whole time despite the cool temps on Saturday morning. That's the little mash tun that could!

After 60min, we took the last gallon that we were going to add and got it up to a boil so that we could get the temp up for mash out. We ran some of the wort off into the brew pot to make room for the mash out and added the boiling water being sure to stir pretty aggressively to avoid hot spots. Once the grain bed had a steady temp of 168-170, we let it hold for 10 min and started up our batch sparge water.

We did two batch sparges, the first was 5 gallons and the second was 3 and both were at 170f. We were planning on a 90 min boil so we wanted to have 13 gallons to start with and we got that and then some.

Our pre-boil gravity 1.035, which was lower than the 1.041 beer smith told us we should have, but as the intrepid brewers we are, we brewed on!

After getting a few close calls on boil overs, we were able to get a healthy rolling boil and started the 90 min boil process. I was glad we got started early because there was no rush and we were able to wait the full 1/2 hr before adding the first hops. We added the 4oz of Golding's (5%) into the hop bag and let it dangle.

Our final hops addition was 1 oz at 5 min and some irish moss for good luck.

We separated the wort into two buckets and split the 1000ml starter between the two. We ended up using London Ale (1028) for the brew as Ed was out of 1335. It's an interesting yeast. After using the ESB and American Ale for the last few brews, it's noticeable that the London is a lot slower out of the gates that the other two. But it's chugging away now.

Our OG would up at 1.054 which was exactly what we were looking for, so I am assuming the additional time we used in the boil helped. We dry hopped it with an OZ each of Cascade leaf hops (5%) and the airlock has a very hoppy smell coming out of it.

Ted sent me a message on the previous post concerned with our dangerously low aroma hops rate and I have to thank him. If a fellow brewer gives you an excuse to add more hops, take it! I think I am going to pick up another OZ of the same leaf hops to add to the secondary and maybe a third to hop to the keg! Who knows.

Anyway, all is well at the brew house.

Cheers!

PS- The brew is going to be called "Red Face Ale" after the guy passed out in the picture.

Back at it with a red ale

So after an election week break (I hope everyone went out and voted!) we are back in business. We decided that this week we were going to brew up a nice hoppy American Red Ale. We were going for something along the lines of a fat tire red ale and a few others we saw.

Listed below is the 10 gallon recipe we came up with:

Recipe Specifications
--------------------------
Batch Size: 10.00 gal
Boil Size: 12.55 gal
Estimated OG: 1.054 SG
Estimated Color: 12.3 SRM
Estimated IBU: 38.6 IBU
Brewhouse Efficiency: 59.0 %
Boil Time: 90 Minutes

Ingredients:
------------

18.50 lb Pale Malt (2 Row) US (2.0 SRM) Grain 72.1 %
3.50 lb Caramel/Crystal Malt - 10L (10.0 SRM) Grain 13.6 %
3.50 lb Munich Malt - 20L (20.0 SRM) Grain 13.6 %
0.15 lb Black (Patent) Malt (500.0 SRM) Grain 0.6 %
4.00 oz Goldings, B.C. [5.00%] (60 min) Hops 36.6 IBU
1.00 oz Cascade [5.50%] (5 min) Hops 2.0 IBU
1.00 oz Centenial [5.00%] (Dry Hop 8 days) Hops -
1 Pkgs London Ale (Wyeast Labs #1028) Yeast-Ale


Mash Schedule: My Mash
Total Grain Weight: 25.65 lb
----------------------------
Name Description Step Temp Step Time
Step Add 9.62 gal of water at 168.4 F158.0 F 70 min
Mashout Heat to 168.0 F over 2 min 168.0 F 10 min

This should come together nicely. It seems as though it's going to be a pretty hoppy red ale, obviously not like Cascazilla (Ithaca Brewing) or anything, but it should have a nice hop profile.

Nick made this recipe and this is his first stab at playing around with the creation of recipes. I will hopefully have a few more posts in the next few days to catch up on a few things that happened while I was running around including a cider update, new kegs and a keg system I built with Nick.

Cheers!

PS- I also entered the old balls into a brewing contest based out in Saratoga.