Friday, March 06, 2009

Brew #68: American Pale Ale

I love hoppy beers, and here we have another one. I haven't really dry hopped my beers for a long time now. I did it on two IPAs earlier, but was not happy with the results. This time, I can say after having tasted the result, the result of dry hopping is quite impressive. The beer ended up with a great hop aroma and flavour. I guess I could have left the dry hops on the beer for a longer period, but I'm very happy with the result, and will definitely dry hop many more beers in the future. This is also the first time I've dry hopped with pellets. I've been a little afraid of getting too much hop debris in the beer, but that seems to be no problem as the hop pellets sank to the bottom quickly. The beer is still young, but there is quite a bit of yeast still in suspension in the keg, so I'll leave it in the kegerator a little longer before a draw a final conclusion. The FG is surprisingly high, even though the beer does not taste sweet at all.

Added 1ts CaCO3 (calcium carbonate) and 1ts to boil.

The batch was brewed 2009-02-03.

Style:
American Pale Ale
Type:
25 liters. All grain, batch sparge
Colour:
23 EBC (Amber)
Bitterness:
39 IBU
Malts:
5700g Pale malt, Pearl, Muntons
400g Melanoidin malt, Weyermann
400g Crystal malt, 150 EBC, Thomas Fawcett
Mash:
67C, 90 min
65% efficiency
Hops:
40g East Kent Goldings pellets, 4.8%, 60 min
40g Centennial pellets, 9.1%, 15 min
40g Centennial pellets, 9.1%, 1 min
60g Amarillo pellets, 8.4%, 1 min
56g Columbus pellets, 12.2%, dry hop for 4 days
Yeast:
1 pack Wyeast 1272 American Ale II (0.9 liter starter on magnetic stirrer)
Boil:
75 min
Fermentation:
19 C

OG: 1.053 FG: 1.017 abv: 4.7%

2 comments:

Lars Marius Garshol said...

I'm curious: why do you think dry hopping worked better this time than previously?

grove said...

I feel that the result was better this time because the hops were fresher and because I did not use a hop bag. Not using a hop bag means better contact between beer and hops.