I decided that to ‘celebrate’ the arrival in the White House of one Donald J Trump, I would brew a classic American Pale.
That was the plan, anyway, but circumstances and errors on my part meant that it ended up deviating from that into something rather different, but rather good in its own way.
The recipe started off as a ‘West Coast pale Ale’ recipe from byo.com but, as usual, was subject to some minor initial tweaking based on availability of ingredients.
Huddled Masses American Pale Ale.
Brewdate: 24/1/2017, Extract with grains, 19L.
Target: OG 1050 / IBU 40 / ABV 4.9 Actual: OG 1050 / IBU ?? / ABV 5.2
- 3Kg Extra Light LME (Muntons Maris Otter)
- 230g Crystal Malt (Youngs)
- 142g (57 + 28 + 57) Cascade hops
- 6g Ale Yeast (Muntons Premium Gold)
- Heat 11.4L of water to 70°C, steep the crystal malt for 30 minutes then remove the bag.
- Bring back to the boil and stir in the malt extract.
- Bring back to the boil and stir in the bittering hops (57g)
- Boil for 30 minutes then add the flavouring hops (28g)
- Boil for 15 minutes then take off the heat.
- Add the aroma hops (57g)
- Leave for 10 minutes then transfer to cold water bath to cool after removing hop bags. (Mistake #1: I left the hop bags in by accident and left it to cool for 7 hours while I went out. So rather than the 40 IBUs I was planning, I have a completely unguessable extremely hoppy but rather nice overhopped Pale)
- Finally removed the hop bags, transferred to fermenter and topped up the water to 19L. Put in the water bath and when temperature rose to 21°C checked the OG (1050) and pitched the yeast.
- Two weeks fermenting at 21°C then racked out (OG 1010) so nominal ABV of 5.2%.(Mistake #2: Had a brain fart and racked into bottling bucket with priming sugar (110g sugar in 480ml water) but then left it to condition in the bottling bucket! So I ended up doing a forced carbonation under bottled C02 in a pressure barrel.)
Rea Valley Brewery 