Pale Ale Bottling Day
I’m here bright and early today. I had to take my SO to the airport for a red eye flight this morning, so I thought I would come into work and get an early start. Today we are bottling the Warsh Pale Ale. The labels finally came in yesterday. I transferred the beer off the Hops (which it had been on for 5 days), and I am carbonating it right now. It should be wonderful.
Yesterday I got some IBU (international bitterness units) test results back from an outside lab. I’m not able to test for bitterness here at the brewery, because I need a spectrophotometer in order to do it. I was happy to see that our beers were close to what I predicted in bitterness. How do I predict that? I use ProMash, which is a great little program for formulating recipes. It has really gotten very professional in the last few updates. But I was always suspicious of the IBU calculations, since I know that the shape and efficiency of your kettle is a big factor in how much bitterness you extract from the hops. But promash seems to have done an adequate job.
What did you all think of the MONSTER GARAGE episode? I really enjoyed it. The firetruck brewery was a pretty cool idea. I thought they did an acceptable job of explaining beer to the masses. They sort sidelined the brewers in the episode, but that is to be expected. They did treat them with respect. The did leave out a bunch of details though.. such as the electrical system (did the use the one on the firetruck?) and legal issues (can you license a mobile brewery?). We have been talking around here about making a pilot 1/2bbl brew system. Now Chris is talking about putting one on a trailer, and we could take it around with us to festivals. Wouldn’t that be cool? We could be brewing during festivals, and demonstrating right there how beer is made! I really like that idea!
Speaking of pilot brews, tonight Gerbo and I are pilot batching (homebrewing) Chris’s version of our Anniversary Beer. We will see how it turns out, its more along the lines of a highly hopped dark ale. I think. Here is the recipe maybe you can tell me what it is.
____________________
20th Anniversary Brewhaha
munich base malt 50%
ashburne mild malt 27%
Caramel 80L 16.9%
Chocolate malt 3.2%
Roast Barley 2%
Northern brewer 90min
Hersbrucker 30min
Saaz 1min
Dry Hop Saaz
O.G. 1.079
60IBU’s
California V yeast
______________
Here is my double bock recipe:
Amanator
bonlander base malt 59.4%
Pale Ale Malt 31.3%
Caramel 80L 3.1%
Caramel 120L 6.3%
Tettanger 90min
IBU 15
O.G. 1.074
House Lager Yeast
The Pale malt is a wild card. I may also change the hops to something more modern, like Simcoe or Vanguard. This is just what we had on hand.