After those first horrible weeks of parenthood were over, I wanted to get back on the brewing horse. I've spent so much time on brews that have funky ingredients, high gravities, and so forth, that this time I wanted to do something more straightforward. Hops and barley only! I wanted to focus on my technique. The time seemed right to make a pale ale.
Ingredients:
1 1/2 lbs caramel maltFor this brew, I ordered from a different supplier, Midwest Supplies. This is noteworthy for a couple reasons, one of which I'll get to later, but one thing I liked was that they pre-cracked the grains for me. Beer and Wine Hobby doesn't do that for whatever reason, and I always end up using a rolling pin and worrying simultaneously that I have cracked them too much and not enough.
6 oz dark crystal malt
3.3 lb liquid gold malt extract
3 lb light dried malt extract
1 oz Magnum hops (pellets)
1 oz Ahtanum hops (pellets)
1 oz Cascade hops (whole)
1 tsp Irish moss
English ale yeast
Anyway, bagged the grains and added to the pot. Tried to keep a consistent steeping temperature of 155 degrees F for 30 minutes, but with my electric stove it kept running more to 170.
Added malt extracts and brought to a boil. Added Magnum hops and boiled for 45 minutes. Added Ahtanum hops and Irish moss, and boiled 15 minutes more.
Strained the wort once again, which left much more sediment in the strainer this time. I actually had to stop and clean it out, which I hadn't had to do before. But I took that as a good reason to be straining!
One thing I did differently this time was take more effort to aerate the wort when pitching my yeast. This isn't something I've focused on before; all I've done is stir with a spoon, which is difficult and probably ineffective. This time, though, I brought the power tools. We had once purchased a drill-driven paint mixer from Home Depot that we never ended up using. So I cleaned and sanitized it, attached it to the drill, and let 'er rip. After a minute or two, the wort had built up a big head of airy foam. I'll be honest with you: this is the best idea I've ever had.
Starting gravity was 1.050, about on target.
Ten days later the gravity had hit 1.015, which was on target, but this time I actually did have a good reason to rack it to a secondary. I was dry-hopping, which is what those whole Cascade hops were for. Unfortunately, when I opened the bag, they smelled a little off. A little cheesy. And they looked kind of dry, not brown but not the green color they probably should have been. Faced with the choice to use them or throw them out, I decided to use them.
I kept them in for four days. I have read that a good technique for dry-hopping is to put your hops in a bag with a weight, as they will be more effective immersed in the beer. I did not do this. The hops floated on top of the beer, some of them not even making contact with it. Maybe this was for the best, considering that they seemed off.
Bottling was uneventful, and the beer was actually ready to drink about a week later. The dry hopping was subtle, so even though there's a little bit of the cheesy sensation it is more of a hop flavor and aroma -- better than I feared it would be, anyway.
The beer is good, too. Very bitter, in the intended style. It's a dark brown color, a little murky and not what you would expect from a traditional English pale ale, but apparently more in line with an American-style pale ale. Again, not the best beer I've ever made, but mostly a success.
Postscript: about two months after I bought this kit, a bunch of fraudulent charges showed up on my debit card. Somebody was attempting to buy hundreds of dollars' worth of money orders from Western Union. My bank notified me and I immediately cancelled the card, but I had to file disputes against two of the transactions because they had gone through. Hilariously, after my bank reversed one of them, Western Union then filed a claim against me, as though I were trying to rip them off. The reason my bank allowed them to do it was because whoever made the transaction had used my address, which is usually a sign that it's legit.
Well, after a few phone calls I was satisfied that the problem was resolved (and props to Bank of America, who gets a lot of bad press but was a pleasure to deal with as they handled it quickly), but I thought I would never know what had happened. Then one day I got a letter from Midwest Supplies saying that they were the ones who had allowed my information to be compromised. They were sorry, but seemed to be laboring under the misapprehension that a $20 coupon was enough to buy forgiveness.
Fat chance.
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