India Pale Ale (and an update on the WH Honey Ale)

Short one today, the IPA went without a hitch now I'm a bit more practiced at this whole beer lark.

This proceeded very much as normal; clean, sanitize, steep, boil, hop, cool, pitch. What I've realised is that I've used virtually the same ingredients for this as for the WH Honey Ale from last week, the only real difference being the absence of biscuit malt and honey. Different amounts and times for the hops, plus a little dry hopping should give a different flavour. Therein lies the experiment, how distinct can we make two beers with such similar ingredients?

IPA

White House Honey Ale (1 week)

The difference in colour between the two at this point (at least, at this early stage) is obvious. It's not immediately obvious in the photos, but the Honey Ale has an almost mahogany colour to it, the IPA that familiar pale ale colour. How much this correlates to the flavour, I'll have to wait and see.

The IPA's gravity came out at a decent 1.054; should come out at around 5.5% ABV hopefully.

Nice chunky sediment in the Honey Ale, Irish Moss doing its job.

I'm using Irish Moss again for this batch since, as you can see, it's done well gathering up all the proteins in the Honey Ale into nice big chunks. Conditioning and cold crashing the bottles before serving should further my cause for a lovely clear brew. Just as long as whoever drinks the things decants them properly, we should be golden.

I had to move the fermenter containing the honey ale out of the corner of my bedroom almost immediately; it just wasn't staying cold enough now the weather's decided to act a bit more June-like. After a brief stint in the garage where it was getting too cold at night, I finally settled it in the corner of the... well, I guess it's the laundry room, where it's a fairly stable 16°C.

All that's left is the unfamiliar beast, the braggot.

White House Honey Brown Ale - Brew Day

Managed to get the White House Honey Ale done today; it was not without its difficulties.

There's obviously a reason most recipes specify a whole number of cans of malt extract. Today being the first time I'd worked with the liquid stuff, that reason, I discovered, is that this stuff is like tar. Try weighing
out exact amounts of it. You'll end up with bowls and spoons caked in the a layer of thick gloop that's just going to end up getting washed down the drain. And I've still got half a can's worth sitting in the fridge that'll have to be used within the next week or so.

Steeping the grains. Like making a big pot of not-so-delicious tea.

The only real alteration I made to the directions was to add the honey once the wort was off the boil after reading in countless places that boiling honey also boils off the lovely aromas. The honey isn't going to add much in the name of flavour (at least, it shouldn't if the fermentation is complete enough), so preserving aromas was the priority here. I also added a bit of Irish Moss about 15 minutes toward the end to help with clarifying. The cold crash I managed to achieve in the sink with cold water and several ice packs should help enormously. I've got a feeling this is going to be a much clearer beer than the last.

The quantities of hops and malt were rounded up slightly, in part because of the scales I was using only going to the nearest gram, so I slipped one or two grams over in places. This should be beneficial; one of the reviews I read for this ale felt the sweetness of the honey to be a bit cloying, noting that more hops would help to balance it. Honey, like the liquid malt extract, is a viscous fella and a pain to measure out so the amount used was probably nearer to 100g than 90g. Generally though, this is an experiment, so I'm not too worried about exact measurements, and hope to learn from any mistakes I may have made.

Now to hop quantities. As I mentioned in the previous post, Obama's recipe fails to mention the alpha acid percentage for the hops used. So, a bit of maths and some guesswork were required. I had to assume that the hops the White House used were of average alpha acid percentage; with a quick bit of Googling I garnered some ballpark values for Fuggles and East Kent Goldings hops:

• EKG - 4.7% (source) (a gov.uk address, that's trustworthy, right?)
• Fuggles - 4.65% (source) (only gave me a range, so I took the middle of that range)

The recipe calls for 1.5 oz of each. So we need about 7.00 AAU (1.5 oz * 4.7%), which then scaled down to my embarassingly small one gallon for about 1.40 AAU. Next, I took the AA percentages for the hops I had and divided the required AAU value by these percentages:

• EKG - 1.40 AAU / 7.4% = 0.19 oz
• Fuggles - 1.40 AAU / 5.37% = 0.26 oz

It's by no means perfect, but it'll have to do, (remember this is an experiment more than anything, I'm still learning), at least I know how much has gone in.

In her spot in a dark corner, hopefully not too warm.
Blowoff tube in place of an airlock after the krausen eruption last time.

And now my biggest mistake: I didn't take a proper gravity reading until about 10 mins ago. And I may or may not have greedily poured the sample back in (the hydrometer and trial jar were sanitised, mind). But anyway:

OG: 1.060

Blimey. If this can get down to about 1.015, we're looking at a rather tipsy 6%. Let's hope this ferments completely. It's been in the carboy about six hours now and there's a bit of a foam (krausen, I believe) starting to form on top. So far so good.

Next up: IPA

Beer Plans for June

This is something people blog about, right?
Well, I've got three planned for the next week or two:

• An imitation of the White House Honey Ale
• A cobbled together IPA
• An even more cobbled together braggot.

This is mainly me keeping a track of things.

Basically, I ordered more than was strictly necessary for a one gallon batch of the honey ale (scaling down due to inability to boil 5 gallons in one go) and plan to use what's left for some experiments. The braggot's one I've been meaning to try for a while after tasting a friend's mead and realising I could brew something similar with a bit of malt added.

I'm using the same yeast strain for all three, Safale S-04 English Ale Yeast. This should be fine for the ales, but might be a bit of a stretch on the braggot.

Hopefully I can encourage the braggot yeast to keep working up to it's alcohol tolerance by feeding it a little more honey and malt extract partway through, along with a sacrifice of baker's yeast I'm going to boil to death in the wort.

Suitably Celtic I think, blood magic, for an ancient Welsh brew.

Recipes for all three, one gallon batches along with their sources. I've made do with what I could get my hands on cheaply for the most part. I'm already paying around 20% extra for shipping. In future I'm buying
in bulk. Or venturing to Ye Olde Locale Brewe Shoppe.

White House Honey Ale (source)

• 1.32 lbs light malt extract (liquid) (I'm using Cooper's)
• 0.2 lbs light dry malt extract (Munton's spray malt)
• 2.4 oz amber malt
• 1.6 oz biscuit malt
• 0.2 lbs honey
• 0.3 oz Kent Goldings hop pellets
• 0.3 oz Fuggles hop pellets
• Windsor Dry Ale Yeast Safale S-04 English Ale Yeast

IPA (source)

• 1.6 lbs pale malt extract
• 0.2 lbs crystal amber malt
• 0.15 oz Northern Brew Fuggles Hops (~ 9.8 alpha)
• 0.2 oz Cascade East Kent Goldings hops (~ 4.6 alpha)
• 0.3 oz Cascade East Kent Goldings hops (for dry hopping)
• Wyeast American Ale Yeast Safale S-04 English Ale Yeast

Braggot (source)

• 0.88 lbs honey
• 0.66 lbs dry malt extract (I plan to use what's left of the Cooper's and top up with Munton's)
• 0.2 oz Fuggles hops
• lemon juice (juice of 2/5 of a lemon)
• few drops of citric acid

Keeping things simple by omitting and substituting some bits here and there based on what I had and what I could get my hands on, shouldn't have too much of an effect on the finished product. Like I said, this is mainly experimentation. My hydrometer arrived this morning so I should be able to keep a better eye on the fermentation than I did with my first batch which was very much a case of "Oh, the bubbles have stopped, time to bottle".

Unfortunately, both the White House and braggot recipes fail to specify alpha acid percentages for the hops so I'm going to be winging the amount based on the average value for those varieties and the value for the hops I have. And some nonsense with bittering units? It's like A-level chemistry all over again.

More as I crack on with the honey ale.