Stout is done, now its Pail Ale week
We spent all of last week making 12 batches of Colony Oatmeal Stout for the Great American Beer Club. The stout ran off really well, but its still a huge amount of grain, and fact that it was running off so quickly somehow made it even more exhausting. I was literally running around all night, moving hundreds of pounds of steaming hot grains as fast as I could. The toughest part was pushing the grain cart outside in the icy weather. I really felt like one of those cave trolls in the Lord of the rings, pushing with all my might to move the overloaded cart just a few more inches… URGGGRR!
We have made over 150 bbls of Stout and now its time to start the Warsh Pail Ale. We did the first brew on saturday to get our ale yeast strain a good head start. We are then going to split that batch up into three different tanks, and the continously brew into them. By going into each tank sequentially, sort of a round-robin affair, we will give the yeast about 8 hours or so divide and grow before the next batch of warm, oxygenated wort is pumped into the tank. We have done this before and it works great giving us a vigourous fermentation. I have to say, we really seem to be getting good this Ale fermentation thing, considering our fermentation room is still averaging 55 degrees. We have a few tricks now, and our Ales are fermenting at an average of 70 degrees. I think this shows we can do anything here if we put our minds to it.
The malt bill on the Warsh Pail Ale is also huge, and the amount of hops is simply staggering. Its even more so now, because our cascade hops are rather low in alpha acids this year, only 4% compared to 5.75% last year. To make sure the beer is properly bitter, I have had to increase the amount of Northern Brewers in the beer. I like to adjust this hop, because it is a high alpha hop. This year our NB’s are 7.5%. If I adjusted the Cascade… It would take many more hops, plus I mostly am using the Cascade in for flavoring and the bitterness contribution is not really essential. This beer has over 13lbs of hops in each batch. Compare that to about 3lbs in our Schild Brau Amber. One side effect of a beer with so many hops is that you lose wort due to the hops sucking it up, and our yield per batch is going to be much lower. A small price to pay for such a yummy hoppy beer.