Tasting Day: Red German, A Collaboration Beer

I did a tasting the other day of beer that was brewed back in November 2014. It was formulated as a brew day when a few home brewers from Bangalore had our first meetup. The recipe was tweaked and tweaked and tweaked till we felt it was right. In fact, we even tweaked it on brew day too.

It was a fairly simple process: gather up what we had at home, formulate a recipe, refine it and brew it. At the time, we called it the Red German, although we’re still not sure if it should go by that name. The recipe can be found here.

Since it was our first beer, we decided to do something simple. We discussed about brewing a red ale and that’s how this beer came about.

I got three bottles of this beer in December 2015 and this is the last bottle. As you can see, the beer has aged for 7 months or so.

The beer pours clear with a fairly white foamy head that sticks around for some time. Although you cannot see it from the snaps, it has a nice deep ruby red hue and is clear.

Like I mentioned earlier, this was a simple beer. Just hops for bitterness and a malt forward profile. And indeed the malt stands out. I can smell it on the nose and it reminds me immediately of malt extract and the dark Belgian candi.

The bitterness follows late on after a sip and it is a pronounced bitterness but not like an IPA.

Although I had three bottles in a span of 7 months, I think I should have wizened up and not aged them for long since it tends to get slightly less maltier as the months go by. And this would make for a great session beer and I would certainly not age this beer. Ever.

Tasting Day: Honey Orange Wheat

Recipe and Brewday here.

It is hot in Bangalore and this is a good time for a light crispy beer, say, a session ale or a Hefe.

I haven’t made a Hefe in some time but I did brew a Honey Orange Wheat a few weeks back and I think it spent enough time bottled up and going by my calculations it would have been carbonated well. And so I cooled a bottle of the Honey Orange Wheat the other day.

The beer poured with a strong white head and which slowly settled down to half a finger thick head. The yeast cleared up well and this showed in the beer. This beer wasnt fermented with a wheat yeast and so the traditional clove or banana aroma were missing. What immediately hit my nose was the strong orange notes.

The first sip was revealing: wheat, orange and malty sweetness, of which orange was the strongest and lasted the longest in the mouth. I tasted an inherently strong alcohol note later which was what a late addition of 100 grams of honey contributed to the wort.

Although the orange aromas were enjoyable at first, it became an issue later on because it was overpowering in every sip. This was when I realized that I overdid it with the orange peels. I have to tone it down if I make another batch and I believe it is best to go with peels from one orange instead of two.

Brew Day: Mad Hopper IPA #1

There is no perfect IPA, but there are some really good ones. And there are great ones. Then there are those IPAs made on a whim throwing in whatever fancies the brewer. The results could be great with perhaps a quick jotting down of the recipe, or they could be so bad that they may never be spoken about.

With the thought of making an IPA, I browsed through my hop collection and saw a good variation of both high alpha and low alpha hops and worked out a recipe in my head. The malt used was to be extract and the hops would vary based on what I had.

I call this the Mad Hopper IPA. And because this recipe could change based on what hops I had, I decided this should be part of a series called the Mad Hopper series. So technically, this would be Mad Hopper IPA #1.

I decided that I would have only 2 bittering additions but anything after that would be for aroma and flavor, and so I wrote down a quick recipe. After writing down the recipe, I tweaked the recipe a bit to rearrange the hops with their times. And then I calculated the quantities in an online recipe calculator so I could hit 35 or so IBUs.

Presenting Mad Hopper IPA #1

Mad Hopper IPA #1 (Tasting notes here)

Specifics

Batch size (litres): 8 litres
Type: Extract

IBU: 35

SRM: 25

OG: 1.064

Grains and Sugars
1.4 kg Malt Extract
 - 600 grams added at the start of boil
 - 800 grams at flame out

Hops
3 grams Aurora @ 60 mins
3 grams Columbus @ 45 mins
3 grams Northern Brewer @ 30 mins
3 grams Perle @ 15 mins
3 grams Cascade @ 10 mins
2 grams Goldings @ 5 mins
5 grams Goldings dry hopped for 7 days
5 grams Cascade dry hopped for 7 days

Yeast

Fermentis S-04 Ale Yeast

Schedules
Boiled for 60 minutes.

Brew Day: Citra SMaSH Dark Ale

SMaSH: Single Malt and Single Hop

A SMaSH beer is a beer that’s easy to brew since the brewer works with just one hop and one malt. The malt can be a single type of grain, say Pilsner or Pale Ale, or a single type of extract, either LME or DME.

The hops chosen are usually aromatic, few bittering additions are made but most hop additions are made towards the end of the boil, and even a hop charge at flame out. Sometimes a dry hop is carried out with the same hops.

SMaSH beers are good starting points to get to know different malt and hop profiles and how well they go together or to even try out different malts with the same hops to see how.

Last evening I made a very simple SMaSH using extract and Citra and unlike most other brews I’ve done, I stuck to a 30 minute boil. So, in effect, this was a very, very quick brew. Other than extracting bitterness, I do not see a reason for boiling this wort for 60 minutes and I was aiming for a low IBU on this beer. So for those who brew this recipe and want to extract more bitterness, you can aim for a 60 minute boil.

Citra SMaSH Dark Ale (Tasting notes here)

Specifics

Batch size (litres): 8 litres
Type: Extract

IBU: 15

SRM: 25

OG: 1.060

Grains and Sugars
1.3 kg Malt Extract
 - 600 grams added at the start of boil
 - 700 grams at flame out

Hops
10 grams Citra @ 30 min
2 grams Citra @ 15 min
2 grams Citra @ 5 min
3 grams Citra @ 0 min
10 grams Citra dry hopped for 7 days

Yeast

Fermentis S-04 Ale Yeast

Schedules
Boiled for 30 minutes.

Tasting Day: Palest Pale Ale #1

Recipe and Brewday here.

Last week, after a few errands in the hot Bangalore sun, I came home to a nice cool bottle of my Palest Pale Ale.

When I poured it out, I instantly realized that this is a blonde ale and that I should have named my recipe as a blonde ale. Those who plan to brew this beer, take note: call it a blonde ale.

This is one half of the Palest Pale Ale, the other half being an attempt to clone DogFish Head’s Midas Touch which I will review shortly. This was dry hopped with a bit of Goldings. I used only a bit of hops as I didn’t want it to be an overly hoppy session ale. And therefore, it has a moderate hop note on the nose.

It pours a very faint yellow, but in a full glass it rounds off to a perfect blonde shade and I think I achieved my target of brewing an ale that’s lighter in color that the Kingfisher Premium.

Carbonation was on the lower side and the half inch thick head dies down to a few millimetres in a few minutes.

As I sipped the ale, I inhaled and the hop aroma and the beer made for a very relaxing drink. The beer has a very low bitterness that is balanced by a certain sweetness that is evident from the first sip. There isn’t much body to the beer, and in a way that makes it very sessionable. It isn’t fussy, there’s not a lot about this beer that you can write about and it most definitely makes you want to have another one.

All in all, this is a midly hoppy and very easy drinking session ale.

Brew Day: Mild Pale Ale

Like most home brewers, I too started out with extract and I have a bit of it left over. One of the best things about an extract recipe is that most of the times, I hit the required original gravity with ease. I do not have to worry about the efficiency since there’s no grains involved. I do not have to worry about sparging. And I do not have to worry about maintaining temperature.

Over a period of time, home brewers will move away from extract and go all grain. They all swear, and I do too, that once you go all grain, there’s no going back. There’s this thing about all grain that makes it worth the time and the effort because at the end of the process you get a great beer. Please do not see this as an attempt to diss extract brewers. There are some extract brewers who make amazing beers and can even stand up to the very best all grain ones.

What I intend to say here is that I too have quite a bit of extract left over from my initial days and I don’t think I will forsake extract brewing completely. I formulated a very simple pale ale recipe (yes, another pale ale) which involved steeping some base malts, late addition of extract and then boiling for a full 45 minutes. Experienced brewers would raise their eyebrows when they read ‘steeping some base malts’, because usually steeping is carried out for specialty, crystal or roasted malts. But then I didn’t really look at what I was getting into and steeped the base malts anyway.

Mild Pale Ale (Tasting Notes here)

Specifics

Batch size (litres): 8 litres
Type: Extract with Grains

IBU: 22

SRM: 16

OG: 1.055

Grains and Sugars

155 grams Pale Ale
155 grams 2-Row
1 kg DME
 - 500 grams added at the start of boil
 - 500 grams at flame out

Hops

8 grams Cascade @ 45 min.

Yeast

Fermentis S-04 Ale Yeast

Schedules

Mash base malts at 66°C for 60 minutes.

Boiled for 45 minutes.

Brew Day: Honey Orange Wheat

The first craft beer I tasted was a Hefeweizen at Toit. Fruit, cloves, yeast, sometimes banana, a moderate ABV and very, very drinkable; that’s how I would describe a Hefe. Brewing a Hefe right now is difficult for me because I cannot maintain the required temperature (17 to 20°C) during fermentation and therefore I would prefer to brew it in winter.

However, having wheat and pale ale malt in the house gives me the opportunity to make an American Wheat Ale, and in this case a Honey Orange Wheat. I based my recipe on a Hefeweizen but used Pale Ale malt instead of Pilsner, a bit of Crystal 40 and 100 grams of honey at flame out. The base malts were in equal measure and my concern at the time of writing the recipe was more towards how much orange peels I should add to the beer. I decided I wanted orange on the nose and when I drink it, but not a heavy aroma or flavour and therefore I added the peels of 2 oranges for about 3 days.

Honey Orange Wheat (Tasting notes here)

Specifics

Batch size (litres): 8 litres
Type: All Grain

IBU: 17

SRM: 5

OG: 1.060

Grains and Sugars

1 kg Pale Ale
1 kg Wheat malt
10 grams Crystal 40
100 grams Honey (at flame out)

Hops

4 grams Northern Brewer @ 60 min.
2 grams Northern Brewer @ 30 min.

Yeast

Fermentis S-04 Ale Yeast

Schedules

Mash at 68°C for 60 minutes

Sparged at 80°C for 15 minutes

Boiled for 60 minutes.
Added the peels of 2 oranges for 3 days after primary fermentation.

Note
- What we get in a majority of super markets in India isnt orange, its a citrus fruit called kinnow which is a hybrid of the mandarin orange.