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By Jay Schroyer on Oct 6th 2008, 9:20 pm
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Hmmm, first brew in a year (NB's extra pale ale: 7.5 pounds two row, 1 pound belgian pils, 2 ounces of cascades for an hour and 1 ounce near flameout). Everything that could go wrong did, but I plowed ahead anyway. My mash temp was off by 10 degrees so the mash was at about 142 for an hour. Seems I made a very fermentable wort since I achieved 82% attenuation with one packet of US-05 just sprinkled into the carboy (OG 1.045, FG 1.008). To make matters worse, the gas hose on my burner got damaged in storage so I ended up doing a stovetop boil on my gas stove. Aaargh, trying to boil 6 gallons of wort for an hour on such a small flame was very frustrating. Chiller was all goofed up so pitched kind of warm and wasn't able to cool the fermenter down until the next day with a wet towel and fan. Figured I'd have 5 gallons of jet fuel before long. But...this session exemplified RDWHAHB to me. For all the worrying the final product is pretty darn tasty. I dryhopped it with an ounce of whole Cascades for 2 weeks and the aroma is awesome. The beer is bone dry almost the way a dry wine steals the moisture from your tongue, but there's a pleasant bitterness to it, not much body mind you, but it's doesn't just taste like hop water and I would definitely drink this in the summer. All in all not too shabby for a rusty brewer that couldn't get his act together. |
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