Beach Brew

Boing Boing: Diddy and Bjork have a conversation: the animated gif
This one of the funniest things I have seen. Do yourself a favour and check it out.

I found this image via Boing Boing and I quite liked it. The scientific method tests ideas and refines them and the faith method just keeps believing. It says a lot.

The IPA has been bottled and it appears my measurements were correct. So I have some how managed to get some crazy attenuation on that beer. A combination of highly attenuating yeast and a low mash temp I think. It smelt great and tasted really over the top when I tasted it at bottling so I am looking forward to trying some cold and carbonated.

I have also brewed my fist steam beer. A style I have been meaning to brew for some time. Recipe is roughly 95% Trad Ale Malt, 5% CarraMunich. Bittered with Magnum to about 35ibu and a additions of Northern Brewer at a5 and 5 minutes for flavour. Mashed it at 66C and am fermenting at 15C with 2112 California Lager yeast. This yeast had a lot more krausen than I was expecting and a 26l batch climbed out of a 30l fermenter a couple of times. OG was about 1.046 which is just under style and the colour is a little lighter than style guides dictate too but I’m calling it a steam beer anyway. No tastes yet as it is just starting to drop from high Krausen so will taste in a few days time.

Also made a Alt today with Ash who is just getting into brewing. A nice simple one with Ale malt, some Munich and a little Caraffa 2. It is bittered with Magnum which has become my standard bittering hop as it is very smooth and very clean. Also had a ten minute addition of Hallertau. I’m not the worlds biggest fan of Spalt so I used other German hops instead.

Next up I want to brew my APA again but with some alterations. The last one has come out a bit grainy and a bit worty. I am going to try removing or reducing the wheat and cutting back on the Munich. I will makes these up with some ale malt, Marris Otter, and maybe some carrapils. Though probably not the carrapils as I want to dry it out a bit more. I don’t want to reduce the Munich too far though as I really like the way the flavour balance the American hops.

I have recently made an extraordinarily silly IPA. The recipe for which was a couple of posts ago. Though the hops did vary a little. Due to being busy this has spent 21 days in primary with the 1007 German Ale yeast. I just racked it onto 80gm of Simcoe and will leave it for another week before. bottling. It was tasting very bitter and very rough out of the fermenter. Has a great copper colour though. Not as much aroma as I was expecting but I’m sure that is partially masked by the massive amounts of yeast in it. This will certainly be rectified with the dry hopping though. I needed to use up the simcoe so it all went in.

I used 1007 on this one as it was going to be a fairly big beer so I wanted good attenuation. Well I have certainly achieved that. I want to make some more measurements when I bottle. However, todays measurement would seem to indicate it has attenuated from 1.076 to 1.006. It showed no signs of infection so I think that maybe my measurements either today or when this was started were incorrect. 1007 does attenuate well but that seems ridiculous. From tasting, aroma and visual inspection there are no sign of infection so this is either a crazy yeast or I have some bad measurements. I did have a few beers on this brew day so the latter in entirely possible. I can’t confirm the og but will check the terminal gravity again when bottling.