Recipe Time

The recipe for the American Pale Ale to be brewed by those taking part in the International Homebrew Project is really quite simple. The recipe is formulated for a 5 US gallon batch and is:

• 9.8lbs 2 Row Pale Malt
• 1.7lbs Caramel 10
• 0.6oz Centennial boiled 60 minutes
• 0.5oz Amarillo boiled 15 minutes
• 0.5oz Cascade boiled 1 minute
• Whatever yeast you want

I will be perfectly honest you, I used the "Beer Generator" option at Beertools.com to generate this recipe, and according to the report that was output, the beer should be as follows in terms of IBUs, colour and gravity:

• OG - 1.058
• IBU - 37.5
• SRM - 6.98
• ABV - 5.5 - 6%

For those doing an extract based recipe, I found a formula for converting from base malt to dry malt extract which multiplies the weight of base malt by 0.6 - which gave a result of 5.9lbs. Those using liquid malt extract, multiply by 0.8, making it necessary to use 7.8lbs of extract.

If, like me, you brew less than 5 gallons at a time, re-scale the recipe as necessary, and I would recommend using the lightest possible extract, hence I will be buying Munton's Extra Light instead of the usual light I use.

The timeline, as I previously suggested, is as follows:

• Feb 12/13 - brew the beer
• Feb 26/27 - bottle the beer
• Mar 19/20 - try the beer
• Mar 21 - write about the beer

If you are planning to take part, leave a comment here or email me to let me know.

Oh CAC!!

The public have spoken, or at least those interested enough to take part in the polls I have been running as part of my International Homebrew Project. The hops for the American Pale Ale to be brewed will be the classics of the style:

• Centennial for bittering
• Amarillo for flavour
• Cascade for aroma

I understand that some people may have restricted access to hops from the Pacific North West, however I know that The Hop Shop in England will ship throughout Europe, although postage may be a bit pricey.

Given the details that I have at hand now, I will now generate a recipe which is faithful to the parameters for the style, as given in Designing Great Beers. The recipe will be posted as both All-Grain and Extract with specialty grains, to allow as many brewers as possible to participate, without getting into the whole "all grain is superior to extract" argument here.

The provisional plan is for all those interested to brew on the weekend of February 12/13, then let the beer sit in primary for 14 days, so bottling would be scheduled for the weekend of February 26/27, followed by 3 weeks conditioning. Participants would then blog about their beers on Monday March 21st.

As I mentioned at the beginning of the project, the choice of yeast is entirely up to the brewer, personally I will be using something from Wyeast, though not entirely sure yet what that will be. One thing is certain though, I am looking forward to making the beer!

Hoppity Hoppity Hop

That was fairly emphatic wasn't it? Of the 14 votes cast, American Pale Ale got 50% of the vote, with 4 for IPA and 3 for English Pale Ale.

According to Ray Daniels' "Designing Great Beers" (a very useful resource which I recommend to every home brewer, whether all grain or otherwise), American Pale Ales have the following characteristics:

• OG: 1.044 - 1.056
• IBU: 20 - 40
• Hop Flavour and Aroma: medium to high
• Colour (SRM): 4 - 12
• Apparent Extract: 70 - 80%
• ABV: 4.5 - 5.5%
• Esters: low
• Diacetyl: low OK

Admittedly Daniels' takes this data from the American Homebrewers Association.

Before deciding what specialty grains will be used to augment the base malt, or malt extract, depending on your choice of all grain or extract with grains, we will decide on which hops will be going into the brew. In some ways I was glad that APA won the poll because we get to play with some high alpha acid hops like Chinook, not to mention hops like Amarillo and Cascade with their signature grapefruit aromas.

Here are the results....

If you are used to listening to the full time football results as announced by the BBC's James Alexander Gordon (get past the Swedish beginning and listen to his voice), you can imagine his tone of voice saying "pale ale rovers 7 porter/stout city 7".

Yes, the two top picks in the base beer poll for the International Homebrew Project were tied on 7 votes a piece, with Scottish/Scotch ale trailing on 5 and weizen/witbier a distant fourth with just a single vote. As I said in my previous post, in the event of a tie, I would draw the winner out of a hat, so this morning I put a cap from a bottle of Bell's Two Hearted Ale and one from a bottle of something from Samuel Adams into a hat and got Mrs Velkyal to draw one.

Out came the Bell's cap, which I had decided would make pale ale the winner, hence the new poll in the corner - having decided that we will be brewing a beer from the pale ale family, we now choose which one.

The poll is open for until Sunday night, on Monday I will publish the decision and we can start choosing hops and grains to use in the beer, I am looking to have the actual brew day sometime in early February.

Bottled Gold

Yesterday was bottling day for my latest home brew, a Best Bitter which I named Ring of Gold - I used only East Kent Golding hops in the boil and fermented it with the Ringwood Ale yeast and thought "Ring of Gold" sounded better than "Golden Ring".

Since my disaster with the Copper Head Pale Ale, which I plan to make properly some time in the summer, I have gone back to using the Wyeast smack packs instead of vials from White Labs and have had consistently good fermentation as a result. I also brew quite small batches, only about 2.5 gallons a time, because I don't have much storage space in my cellar and I would rather have a broad selection of beers to choose from instead of filling the cellar with 2 batches, it also means I get to brew more regularly. I find the brewing process quite relaxing, so the more I do, the happier I am.

From a technical standpoint Ring of Gold performed exactly as I expected, going from an original gravity of 1.040 to a terminal gravity of 1.008, giving the beer an ABV of 4.3%. According to Beer Tools, the beer has an IBU rating of 28, which is on the lower end of the scale for a Best Bitter.

Next up in the brewing queue is another batch of LimeLight, a wheat beer I made last summer using lime peel instead of the more common curacao orange. The recipe for LimeLight was made available to Czech home brewers through Homebrewing.cz - unless you speak Czech don't bother - and seems to have gone down well with people who have made it. Of my own version, Ireland's venerable Beer Nut described it thus:

"The carbonation is spot-on and I've got a nice, lasting layer of froth on the top. I'm tasting a sweet biscuity base, and then there's the sharp and tangy citric fruitiness. Topped with the froth, the whole thing is remarkably like drinking lemon meringue pie. A genuinely excellent beer, well done"

Taking on board some comments from The Beer Nut, I have decided to add some ginger into the mix for this version and see where that takes the beer.

As ever with my home brewing, every prospect pleases.

PS - there is only one day left to vote on the base beer style for the International Homebrew Project, and as things stand we have equal votes for three of the four beer styles. If they are still tied when the poll closes, I will pull the winner out of a hat.

Homebrewers of the World Unite!

I had a thought yesterday evening, and yes it hurt. I guess most of the people who read Fuggled are more than just beer lovers, they are also home brewers - I know for a fact of at least 10 regular readers who also make their own brew, not to mention the two or three professional brewers who are also part of the Fuggled community.

Several of these home brew/pro-brew bods have given me invaluable tips and advice for improving my beer making, whether discussing ingredients, brewing techniques or methods for dispensing the amber nectar. It was this sense of community that got me thinking about organising an international home brewing project.

The project would be something along the lines of the multi-blog beer reviews I have done in the past with blogs like Pivní Filosof and The Bitten Bullet. However, instead of writing about the same beer and posting our review on the same day, this project would be to brew the same beer, on the same day, each brewer using their own preferred methods (whether all grain or extract with grains) and each brewer using their preferred yeast. The beer in question would sit in primary fermentation for 14 days before being bottled, then after 3 weeks of conditioning, each participating blogger would review their brew - whether they do it just themselves or get a group of people to try the beer and give their views would be entirely up to their whimsy.

Assuming the people I am thinking of would be interested in such a project we could have the same beer brewed in the US, Ireland, the UK, Germany and maybe the Czech Republic - it would also give us more insight into water differences, the influence of yeast on the same base ingredients and various other interesting questions. For those of us in geographical proximity to participants, we could trade beers and then write about those as well.

If you are interested in taking part in the project, then either leave a comment to this post, or drop me an email. The sharp of sight among you will have noticed a poll in the top left of the page, to decide which style of ale we will make (that is my only executive decision, we will be making an ale as opposed to a lager - largely because I don't have the technical necessities to do so!). You we see on the poll that to begin with I have rather broad beer styles to select from, the next decision will be which beer type from within the chosen group will be made.

So, let me know if you are interested, and cast your vote for the beer style to be made, and let's get this started.

Being Selective?

One of the joys of being on warfarin as a result of the deep vein thrombosis I had sucked out of my leg last week is having to find out what foods and drugs interact with the pills. For example, I should really avoid leafy greens because they are high in vitamin K and this actually makes the blood more likely to coagulate, which is not what I want at the moment.

As a lover of beer, obviously I have been very keen to learn about how alcohol reacts with warfarin, which is also used as rat poison! Hopefully I won't be on this stuff for life, but in the event that I am, then I need to find a consistent sensible approach to getting my beer fix. If I am on it for the duration, then one thing is perfectly clear, the days of getting shedded are well and truly over, which I don't really mind that much because I find that boozing until I fall over is no longer "a great night", not to mention that I hate having a hangover and I worry a bit about the effects of popping ibuprofen regularly on my liver.

According to several websites I have read, once I finish injecting myself with Lovenox and am just on the pills I should be able to have a couple of drinks a day, just a quick aside whoever came up with the idea that paying through the nose to give myself injections is a prat.

If then the days of unlimited boozing are over, and I am restrained to only 2-3 beers a day, and don't forget that consistency is important with Warfarin, I guess I will have to become more selective in the beers I drink after all why waste one of my drinks on something crappy? I actually think this will make my homebrewing more important, because I know what I am getting, and I know that I like it!

The question then becomes, how do I know what it good and what is not from the brands I don't know yet?