First APA, All Grain

[6470zzy]

I personally use Nottingham and S-33 for my Pale Ales (and IPAs) but if you are looking for that American feel to it then I think that you will want to try our Safale US-05 it will give you the clean taste taste you might be looking for. I also use Marris Otter or Golden Promise for my PAs but the flavor profile that will match the American brew is simple old 2 row malt. Much cheaper too I might add, although I don't know if you have access to US/Canadian malt. Great pictures thanks for sharing them.

Cheers

[bosium]

Update: Checked the gravity on Monday, it's dropped to 1.015, still a little cloudy. It tastes pretty damn good if I do say so myself.

It's still doing something, the airlock is still going slowly and the beer is still a bit cloudy. I've never used Notty before, but I believe it's a highly flocculant strain so if the beer's still cloudy it must be doing something. I've got the beer as warm as it will go in my kitchen, about 18-ish.

I'll probably leave it another week or so, then rack into my better bottle on top of 30g of cascade for the dry hop. I can't wait to drink this one!

Updated with picture. looks good enough to drink already..

[fivetide]

Can almost smell this brew from here...

Transfer it into a secondary fermenting bucket off the yeast cake and keep for five days at 18 degrees and it will almost certainly drop it another point or two as well as clear considerably. You can also dry hop (again?) at this point too if you like - it's a useful window.

I loved the ice and the falling wort droplets in your photos, btw.

[booldawg]

Sounds good Bosium. I'm supping my 1st APA tonight, think I'll be using those American hops alot more often.

SWMBO is originally from Cape Town too. Goodwood I beleive (sounds like they ripped off the name from England ) So its all 'braai' this and 'lekker' that

[bosium]

Hi all,

Thanks for all the kind words. I'll be racking off the yeast cake tonight and onto the dry hops. I'm off to belgium next weekend with my swmbo for one night (going to Westvleteren to get some trappist ales ) so I won't be able to bottle then, but probably the following weekend. Gives me a few days to crash cool for a few days before I bottle and still allow for the 7-10 days or so of dry hopping.

Will post pics as and when.

Booldawg - great to hear you're a half-saffa by association! Has she got you eating biltong yet? I'm from Bergvliet, sort of the other side of CT to Goodwood (it's a big place, much bigger than you might think!).

And yes, gotta love these american hops. I might make this again with Amarillo next time!

[bosium]

OK, so I racked it off the yeast cake last night. There was very little trub, this has been my cleanest brew yet. The dual elements in my kettle gave me a great hot break, and the chiller with ice created a great cold break. Then the hop stopper and tons of whole hops did a perfect job of keeping all the break material out of the beer. I ended up with a layer of yeast about 6mm deep and with almost no other muck in it, which I washed and stored in a bottle for my next brew.

I racked it into my better bottle on top of 30g of compressed cascades, will dry hop for about 10 days at approx 18.C (basically ambient in my kitchen, I ordered a fermwrap heating jacket from morebeer, along with some thermowells, but they haven't arrived yet. Actually they cocked up something with the shipping charges and I ended up paying $65 in shipping alone instead of the $26 it should have been. Really not happy, very unapologetic and unhelpful support people. grrr. but I digress.)

Pics:


Racking the beer into my better bottle.
I just can't quite bring myself to call this a carboy, but at least it's not prone to shattering, and the tap is very useful.
That's swmbo in her dressing gown holding my racking cane (har har har), bless her.



Close-up on the hops.
They expand a lot after soaking in the beer. Never seen hops come quite so solidly compressed before.
I can't get over how dark the beer looks, it's really a sort of coppery colour I think but never having poured a pint of it it's hard to tell. I threw quite a bit of flaked barley into the mash, so it should have an good head on it.



These two shots show the bottle full, the first was taken last night and the second today, just to show how the hops have swelled up. The little b*stards are probably going to rob me of a pint or two when it comes time to bottle.



Macro of the hops trapped inside the bottle:


The harvested yeast cake.
Should make the next batch take off like a rocket once it's been rejuvenised in a small starter:

[fivetide]

Looks tasty, this one.

[bosium]

OK,

Well it has been dry hopping since Friday evening now. The hops have swelled up even more than in the original pictues, 99% are still floating at the top of the fermenter.

What I'm still a little concerned about is that the beer hasn't cleared yet. It is still pretty couldy. The fermenter is being kept at about 17ish, but there is definitely no more fermentation going on so I cannot understand why the yeast haven't flocc'd yet. I thought this was supposed to be a highly flocculant strain?

I will probably let it dry hop at room temp until friday, then cold crash it to zero for a week. Hopefully that drops it a bit clearer before I bottle it the following weekend.

[fivetide]

Remember you just dumped a load of vegetation in there, and haven't hoiked it out. It should settle out during conditioning, along with the priming sugars. Give it plenty of time.

[bosium]

fivetide,

I can't leave it in the secondary for too long as I have no way of removing the hops and I don't want to extract any grassy flavours, which I've been told is the danger when dry-hopping for too long. Do you mean conditioning in the bottle?

I had hoped to have then yeast drop out by now, perhaps some of the haze is from the hops. I have isinglass, but I've never used it before and also I'd be afraid that it might drop out a lot of the aroma I'd just put in by dry hopping.

[bosium]

Well I got back from my Belgium trip on Sunday, man the car was absolutely loaded down with Trappist beer, cheese and chocolate. What a wonderful country

Anyway, after nine days at room temp (16-19C), I cranked the fridge down to zero and all of the floating hop cones have sunk to the bottom. The beer is still majorly cloudy though, I guess it can't be yeast as I'm sure the cold temp would have dropped it out in a couple of days at 0C. Could the hops have contributed to the haze? Maybe it's just too much flaked barley this time.

Not sure if I should just lager it til it's clear, or bottle and take my chances. I've ruined too many batches by rushing things, but I'm afraid to leave it on the dry hops for longer than a few weeks.

[bosium]

Well, it's been 10 days in the ferment fridge at -1.C, and it is still just as cloudy as when it went in. I need to get it off the dry hops, so I am going to isinglass it this week and then rack to the keg this weekend (just ordered a shiny new system from NORM, thanks Adm for the advice) and hopefully the rest will eventually drop out while lagering in the keg.

I have been doing some reading and I have a feeling that the permanent haze is at least partly due to an excessively high mash pH, which would cause it to leach all sorts of crap from the grains. I had the exact same problem with a belgian blonde I made (Pilsener malt and Saaz only). I managed to get a water report for my area, and through some reading and using John Palmers spreadsheet it appears that my water has a fairly high residual alkalinity, which would make it ideal for the browner beers. This would explain why my brown ales always come out perfectly but I struggle with the paler beers.

I guess I really should have looking into this a bit more from the beginning , but I will be making water adjustments and actually checking my mash pH from now on. I think I will build my water from a bottled source for my next brew (either a bohemian pils or a sam adams clone, can't decide).

[Barley Water]

The faster you can get your wort down under about 140F, the more hop aroma and flavor you capture. Of course, if you are making an APA or IPA, that is a big deal. If you check out Mr. Malty's website, you will see a big discussion about that along with directions to build an immersion chiller that is supposed to be a real beast. According to the website anyway, you can drop the temperature of a 5 gallon batch to under 140F in 5 minutes using normal tap water. Naturally, to get this kind of performance, you need a pump capable of handling boiling hot liquid which as you correctly point out is not cheap. I recently built one of these things and I will report back on how well it works once I get a thermometer port welded onto my brew kettle and fix one other screwup with the chiller itself (no project is worth doing unless you end up in the hardware store at least a half dozen times). My plan is to drop the wort to around 100F with tap water then start pumping ice water through the chiller (with a fountain pump) to get the wort to fermentation temperature. I am hoping that this thing helps me make better lagers as well as help out with hoppy ales, we will see.

[bosium]

Hmm, well my IC gets the temp down pretty quickly, and I do recirculate ice water and stir the contents of the kettle. My beer has plenty of aroma, and tastes pretty good, my only gripe with it so far is that it's cloudy :-/

I actually bought 25m of 10mm copper tube on ebay, so I will be making a massive IC as soon as I get my hands on a corny keg to form the copper around.

[pantsmachine]

I use Nottingham a fair bit but i am now on a US-05 jag. Well worth a try if you have not been there yet. Stops dead at 1.008 for my last 2(different) brews and settles really fast to a tight compact layer in the bottle which does not budge at all on opening. No use if you want the yeast to play a BIG part in your taste but worth a whirl. Heck i got 10 packs from Paul this week and all US-05!