The dangers of tasting a collaboration beer without your collaborators...

I'm sorry Alex and James.

Proper post coming soon.

I so Pale.

You can tell she's thinking about brewing a Pale Ale.

Time to brew a session beer, i thought.

While buying the grain for the Amber Ale i brewed, me and my friend bought a 25kg bag of pale ale malt because it cost less to buy over 20kg, we knew we'd use it, and it was a fucking 25kg bag of grain.

Mate.

So after brewing 2 all grain brews: the Coffee Stout and the Amber Ale, i decided to finish off the hops in the freezer and use some of this grain i had sitting around to make an awesome session beer that my friends could drink, and the idea was to make lots of it.

As mentioned previously, i have a 32 L pot, and i wanted to make 30 litres of beer. The best way to do this would be to dilute. 

The recipe was simple:

Grain:

-6kgs of Joe White Pale Malt, finely crushed.

Left over freezer hops (guess work):

-20g Chinook at 60mins

-20g Centennial at 30mins

-And a definite 30g of Cascade, dry hopped for 7 days.

It was a 20 L mash for 60 minutes from 68C down to 65C and then an hour long boil, giving me a very concentrated 15 L of sweet wort. Just before adding the yeast i added an extra 15 L of cold tap water, bringing me up to 30 L at about 1.045. Perfect!

I had a friend come over and help out on the brew day, he is the bar manager at Deja Vu, his name is Joe.

Another thing was that i borrowed my friend James' grain mill for the day, which he had recently purchased. It was fun... I got to use a power drill.

1.5L of grain = 1kg of grain.

Hamish's "power drill".

Getting better at sparging i think...

Thanks Joe!

Something something boil is finished! And this is what it looked like after leaving it to chill on its own in the bathtub for a while!

A nebula of beer...

A nebula of beer... Changing my blog from 'Smell My Beer' to 'The Beer Nebula'. DONE.

Here is the tasting of the beer about 2 weeks after bottling:

Photos and video taken by Becky Nosiara unless otherwise stated or obvious.

A red sun rises...

An Amber Ale was brewed this night.

Not long ago, an Amber Ale named Killer Sprocket from a brewery called Killer Sprocket came on tap at the pub and it was delicious. It pretty much summed up what i want from an Amber ale. A shit ton of malt,

and valour.

So shortly after, i decided to brew one, especially considering it was Autumn at the time and Ambers are usually a good cold weather beer. In Melbourne, you need that.

The recipe i stole straight from John Palmers 'How to Brew'. I figured it would be the best place to start, that guy seems to know what's up. This is what my recipe looked like after a couple of modifications because of availability.

Big Basin Amber Ale

3.8kg Joe White Pale Malt

560g Crystal 60L

350g Crystal 90L

350g Torrified Wheat

14g Chinook at 60 mins

28g Hallertau Mittlefrueh at 30

28g Willamette at 15

All done Brew in a Bag style.

Mash went fine thanks to a cozy sleeping bag, hugs and some love.

Since this was my second brew, sparging was a little bit tricky, so i'm not sure how much i managed to get out of the grain, but i did it anyway.

Sweet, sweeeeet wort.

I really need to notch my pot so i know how much liquid i have in there.

Hops with scattered grain husks. What any good brew day should look like.

Done.

During bottling another beer i will make a post about.

The best beer I've made for sure. We started drinking them too early because after we tried one, and it tasted so good, we couldn't stop. Near the end of the batch it started tasting MUCH better, but by that time we only had about 6 left... And now we only have one...

Maybe i should make all my posts LOTR themed...

Ah well, lesson learnt. Have patience, it will taste much better that way.

Most photos/video taken by Becky Nosiara.