Today, I made the jump to all grain brewing. It's been a long time coming. I've been saving up so I could upgrade my equipment to allow me to do all grain. I recently bought a 10 gallon Rubbermaid mash tun from more-beer and a 60,000 BTU propane burner. Added to the blichman brew kettle my wife bought me for my b-day, I'm ready to rock.
I wanted to do a somewhat easy beer, but something I could brew a lot and make my "house" beer. Lately, I've been hooked on Harpoon Brown Ale. It's their rendition on an American Brown, with some good up front bitterness, and balanced malt sweetness. I'd probably tell you it's my favorite beer right now, but that's because I have one in front of me.
My goal for my first batch, was simple.....clone the harpoon Brown and I'm good. So, I went out their site and noted the stats (they don't list malts or hops they use) and hoped to try and match that. I've been listening to Jamil Zainasheff over on the Brewing Network and he had a show on American Brown ales, so I took his recipe and scaled it down to a 6 g batch and reduced the IBU's so it would be closer to Harpoon. I had a problem though, because the day before i was listening to his show on APA's and when I was going through my notes I seem to look at the APA recipe at the last minute and made a change from cara-pils to Munich, why I don't know. Not sure how much of a difference it will make, but we'll see. Below is the recipe and stats.
American Brown Session Ale
OG - 1.052
FG - 1.010
ABV - 5.5%
quarts per lb - 1.3
Fermentables:
10 lbs American 2-row
.25 lbs Victory Malt
.5 lbs Munich Dark
.75 lbs Crystal 40L
.25 lbs Crystal 60L
.5 lbs Chocolate Malt
Hops:
1 oz Phoenix (10% AA - 60 min)
.5 oz Amarillo (7% AA - 15 min)
.5 oz Amarillo (7% AA - Flame out)
Yeast:
Wyeast 1.056 American Ale
Grains were mashed in 4 gallons of water. Dough in was at 164 f and mash stabilized for 60 min at 150. The mash temp dropped to about 148 f by the last few minutes, but I think it was because I had the top to the mash tun off a bit then getting ready for the sparge. Sparge was with 5.5 g of water at 175 f. The wort boiled down to about 6.5 gallons and I collected about 5.5 in the carboy.
Cheers,
Jason
3 comments:
Congratulations. You will be an even happier brewer. Get ready for some bad ass brews!
This brown ale looks good, the bitterness will definitely be present, and those Amarillo's will be nice. Sweet.
Yeah, I'm pretty excited. It's beena long time coming, and I've been saving for a while.
I'm anxious to try the beer. I think it shoudl have some nice bitterness, but hopefully balance nicely with the caramel malts. It's doing awesome in the carboy, so I'm excited.
It took me a while to switch over to all-grain too. But once I did it was well worth it. I enjoy it more and the end result is usually better. Cheers.
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