Ingredients:
Domestic Two Row Malt 2-3L, 10 lbs.
Wyerman Dark Munich Two Row Malt, 9-11.5L, 1 lb.
Muntons Dark Crystal Two Row Malt, 135-165L, 1 lb.
Cascade, 2 oz., pellets
Wyeast 1056
2 pint standard starter (1 pint water per 1/2 c. DME)
Mash:
153 degrees Fahrenheit/ 60 min.
1.125 qt./lb.
Boil:
7 gal., 90 min.
.625 oz. Cascade, 60 min.
.75 oz. Cascade, 30 min.
.625 oz. Cascade, 5 min.
Well, so there it is. The second recipe I have brewed. Looking back, that Dark Crystal could have been not quite as dark. Whatever. Some things that had been missing in my previous batches got fixed. I was able to figure out exactly how much water I was using. And as such, was able to dial in my pre-boil volume. I also remembered to add Irish moss, forgotten in the previous two brews. Irish moss, for those of you who don’t know, greatly helps in the clarification of beer. It is not in and of itself the cure to cloudiness, but a teaspoon in the final minutes of the boil helps the end product.
Something else to note is water conditions. One could persue a doctorate in the make-up of the water we drink. An easy way to bypass this is to obtain a water quality report from the location in which one lives. I got mine by calling a few people who work for the water works of Henderson and Las Vegas, NV. I also could have done a little research and found this: SNWA.com. Look at the link, “water quality report.” For the purposes of this brewer, the bicarbonate/alkalinity numbers were most apropos. The water in Vegas has a very high bicarbonate/alkalinity. This is good for bitter beers. Being that an amber ale is not necessarily that bitter I decided to cut my water for this batch with R.O.( reverse osmosis) water. Basically, the reverse osmosis process relieves water of any and all mineral content. Therefore, the ten gallons I needed to get an initial boil volume of seven gallons were replaced with three gallons of R.O. water. That cut the tap water in what I thought to be a sufficient amount for the amber ale I was going to brew. No science included. Does everyone follow?
Now that I had my water minerally balanced, I needed to take out the chlorine injected by humans to make our sewage from Lake Mead safe to drink (again, no science to back this up, pure opinion). This is simply done by adding something called Camden tablets. These neutralize the chlorine in water, thus deactivating the taste of chlorine that otherwise would be present in the taste of the beer to be brewed. Enough mumbo jumbo.
One concern I had going into this brew session had been on my mind for a little while. The question I had was, “What is original gravity(OG) and final gravity(FG)?” Holy Christ. What a loaded question.
As far as I understand, water has a gravity of 1.0000. Physics aside, when you add sugar to water( by mashing grain) it makes the gravity heavier. SO, when you mash grain and then boil the liquid, one is able to measure the gravity. Original gravity is the reading before of the wort after boiling, but before fermentation. In this case, OG was 1.052. Now the FINAL gravity reading (after the yeast is done fermenting the sugar of the wort, roughly three weeks later) is taken before bottling or kegging.
If you can peel back the layers of memory that far (or just read the prior note), I stated the OG of my American Brown Ale wort as 1.0469. But that was before I had boiled it. The FG I had recorded as 1.0832 was actually the OG. Follow? Luckily, being very confused, I recorded the gravity of the brown ale right before I bottled it. THAT gravity reading was 1.0231. So 1.0231 was actually my FG and 1.0832 was actually my OG.
WHEW! You can do the math. My brain is smoking. I think I need an oil change. Anyone who wants to know, can thank Chris Reisetter for putting this information into my head. But enough about OG and FG and Brown Ale. This blog is about an American Amber Ale. Soon after brewing, I left town. Before I left though, I made sure to check that the Amebr was attenuating nicely. It was. At 65 degrees Fahrenheit the batch was going mad, less than 12 hours after the pitching. Chunks of shit were careening around and a nice foamy head had begun to develop. Fast-forward 7 days.
When I got back to the apartment after a particularly enjoyable Christmas holiday, I was greeted with a thermostat reading of 45 degrees Fahrenheit ambient temperature in the apartment. After realizing I had turned off the heat AND that all my fish were dead, I went to my fermentation fridge to check the temp. it was a rather chilly 50 degrees Fahrenheit. Shit, I thought. Upon further investigation though, there was sign of vigorous fermentation. The whole top of my 6 gallon carboy was masked with a film of brown scum. The blow-off tube was caked with scum as well. The ¾ gallon of star san solution was brown with a ½ inch of yeast cake on the bottom. I was confident that before temperatures had gotten too low, primary fermentation had occurred.
So now, a week out from bottling, the temperature od the fermentsation fridege has long since stabled at 65 degrees Fahrenheit and I am pretty confident that the American Amber Ale I made will be just fine. Cheers!
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