I have this really bad habit of making beers and completely forgetting that I run a homebrewing blog, well this won't happen again! Oh I know what you're thinking "but Oscar, you've said this before and nothing changed!" yeah well guess what? You're probably right.
Anyway! What's up people?! ...
Ok.
Well I've been busy, sorta. Firstly, and most excitingly, I've got a couple of sweet new jobs. One is at one of my favourite local breweries: Moon Dog, serving beers at their brewpub, and the other is working at Grain and Grape, which if you have followed along, is my go-to homebrew supplies store.
Anyway! What's up people?! ...
Ok.
Well I've been busy, sorta. Firstly, and most excitingly, I've got a couple of sweet new jobs. One is at one of my favourite local breweries: Moon Dog, serving beers at their brewpub, and the other is working at Grain and Grape, which if you have followed along, is my go-to homebrew supplies store.
LIVING
THE
dream
Also, if all goes to plan, there'll be a little bio about me on this page with a link to this blog on it. So if you've come from there, welcome. My infinite loop is now complete and I can now begin work on my anti matter machine.
Ok, enough about me, let's get down to why you're all really here:
So I've made a few beers since my last post, I made the Burnt Toast and Jam again, which I mentioned a couple of times throughout the blog. It's basically my favourite beer to make/drink and the taste is exactly what the name suggests. I'm not telling you the recipe though because then I'd have to kill you, ferment you and make you into... Uh-oh, I've said too much.
It turned out great, if you were wondering, it always does.
Another beer I made was one to test out my new kegging setup (woo!), a Citra/Amarillo pale ale. Really simple, nice and dry with a delicious tamarillo-esque hop profile, and I churned it out quick enough to just see the last of the hot weather. The recipe was as follows:
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2.5kg Pale Ale Malt
100g Medium Crystal
50g Flaked Wheat
80g Citra @ flameout (the reason it's all at the end is because I was no chilling and it would cook for a bit more as it cools.)
80g Amarillo dry hopped for 4 days
Fermented for 2 weeks with Wyeast 1056 American Ale and then straight into the keg.
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I think next time I would swap the hops, so use Amarillo in the boil and dry hop with Citra. Really keen to maybe throw some actual tamarillos in next time too...
The latest beer I've done, which is still in the fermenter, is a beer inspired by a recipe in Radical Brewing: a cookie brown ale (or biscuit brown ale for all us non-americans).
What separates this recipe apart from other brown ales is that it uses a big hit of oats, kinda like an oatmeal stout, except that you toast them in the oven to give it that real oat biscuit vibe.
So I toasted some oats in the oven about 2 weeks prior to brewing the beer, the reason for the wait is because of something John Palmer said about letting some of the harsher aromatics to escape and if there's one thing I've learnt it's that you should always follow John Palmer's advice even if it doesn't necessarily make sense to you, because science.
Is this obsession healthy?
Brew day was smooth, hit all the numbers which was nice. Particularly hitting my mash out bang on the dot.
I used a malt in this beer that I have been loving lately: Gladfields Toffee, and I haven't even used it in a recipe yet, I could just eat handfuls of it all day long.
A workmate told me that if you use too much there's a chance it can end up giving a buttery taste to the beer that can be confused with diacetyl, and I did use quite a lot of it so I guess we'll just see. I can't imagine it will be terrible either way.
I don't know why I first wort hop so much, I read somewhere that it gives a smoother bitterness and in my experience it has, but this is pseudo-science 101 right here so don't quote me on that.
Here's the recipe:
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1.7kg Maris Otter
1kg Pale Ale Malt
.400g Toasted Oats (300g lightly toasted, 100g dark toast)
.200g Brown Malt
.200g Gladfields Toffee
.080g Dark Crystal
.020g Roasted Barley
10g Fuggles @ FWH
25g Fuggles @ 20mins
No Chilled and fermented with Wyeast West Yorkshire 1469
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So hopefully in the next couple of weeks you'll get an update post about how this beer tastes, fingers crossed, like biscuits!
Stay smelly,
