British Strong Ale. Part 1: The Brewing

All of the Belgian white is almost gone so this weekend we figured we should replenish the homebrew supply. We went to our trusty local homebrew shop, Bob's Homebrew, and picked out some grains. They have recipes that Bob himself has put together, supposedly. We chose a British Strong Ale. It is a simple recipe and should have a lot of alcohol at the end. This will be my first time making a higher alcohol beer and it is a little different.

To get the alcohol a bit higher the recipe called for 248 billion yeast cells (I don't know why it wasn't 250...I certainly don't have that kind of control). The "smack pack" of yeast from the store will generate 100 billion. If you are unfamiliar a yeast smack pack is a small sleeve of dormant yeast with a pouch of nutritional somethingmerother inside. you smack the whole sleeve between your hands to break the inner pouch, thus giving the yeast access to the food it needs to start growing. The sleeve will balloon up as the yeast grow but eventually the growth will stop as all the food is consumed. This is around 100 billion cells. What I had to to double-ish that was make a wort of water and dry malt extract, after the cells had fully grown in the sleeve I gave them more food and transfered them to a sanitized apple juice carton. You can see them in the first picture. the yeast is the lighter colored layer at the bottom

All the ingredients. from left to right: yeast, liquid amber malt extract, Irish moss (smells like fish food), dry Pilsen malt extract (in the back), the milled grains in the paper bag, and the two types of hops used (top US Golding, bottom Northern Brewer's hops)

This recipe had me steep the grains in two quarts of water at 170 °F then flush all the color out of the with boiling water. This rinsing process is a lot of work. The last recipe I did from Bob's tore had me do the same thing and frankly I on't like it as much as steeping all the grains directly in the boiling water. Maybe there is something different happing I'm not familiar with but I would rather have it be like a giant tea bag. Oh well I'll have to do some reading and try it the old way (the tea bag way) next time.

Flushing the steeped grains. The flushed steeped grains ready to go out to the compost. The wort boiling away after the addition of the US Golding hops and both the malt extracts.

After the malts, hops, and grains were added the whole concoction boiled away for 45 minutes. I cleaned up a bit and picked up all the broken branches in the backyard from the crazy wind two nights ago. It only boiled over once while I wasn't paying attention :)

With 15 minutes left I added the Northern Brewer hops and the Irish Moss. I actually added the Irish Moss with the first set of hops so I added just a tiny bit more now as well. Oops. It's probably fine.

After the boil it all chilled down to a reasonable temperature and yes my thermometer is also my multi-meter. It's very versatile! There is a Hg thermometer for backup, too. The gravity reading was 1.062 which was a little low. I think I need to get better at making the final volume exactly 5 gallons. I probably added too much water. But at least with this recipe the worst that will happen is that the alcohol will be something normal-ish like 6% and not 7% like planned. We'll see when the final gravity reading comes in. 

Chilling the wort, on the left. The primary fermenter with the wort and the yeast aerated and all topped off to 5 gallons. The excess hops are in the red bucket.

Stay tuned for part 2! I'll cover the transfer to the carboy and bottling.

Update

I decided to take a video of the airlock bubbling away. It is going pretty quickly and it was at this rate almost immediately. I recorded this while the furnace was on...so there is a loud hum in the background.

Update 2

I never gather enough photos/excitement from the transfer process or the bottling to make another blog post but I thought I'd at least share this link I found about bottles and labels. This answer lists the bottles/breweries with easy to remove labels and the bottles/breweries with hard to remove labels. Hard labels can be a really unwelcome surprise.

Anyway, the beer is brewed. It tastes ok. Pretty much what I would expect a British strong ale to taste like. Not surprised but probably not something I'll guzzle down. The final gravity was 1.016. OG was 1.062. ABV is a little over 6%. Not bad. It was supposed to be closer to 7%. Who knows where it went wrong. Still plenty strong.