First Ag Brew

[stephen]

I found the reason my crystal was so excessive. I found the original recipe that I played with. It was an all grain recipe, quite simple in its construction, that I converted to an extract recipe. The original called for, "1/2-1 lbs" of english crystal. Me, in my wonderful dyslexic reading style read it as, "1-1/2 lbs". When converted to metric this came out to roughly 750 grams.

In future I will put my vanity away and use my reading glasses when perusing beer recipes. :wacko:

regards

Steve

 

[Jazzafish]

Hey Stephen,

I did my forst AG a little while ago. It was like your recipe. I guess it could be called an English Ordinary Bitter? The beer comes first, name later! It was as follows:

4Kg Jw Ale
500gm JW Crystal
200gm JW Wheat

14gm POR @ 60min
14gm Cascade @ 30min
14gm Cascade @ 10 min

I recon people may say it has too much crytstal, but it turned out great. I won't change a thing, I like crystals flavours, and I'm brewing for me!

Like you I had a problem free brew my first AG. Hit all target temps, volumes and gravities. Shame my next couple were a learning curve!

Enjoy the AG experience, as it is both heaven and hell!

Cheers,
Jarrad

 

[stephen]

Well it had to happen. After five extract brews the draw of all grain got to much and I crossed over to the dark side and completed my first AG brew yesterday. How easy is mashing? Place all the goodies in an esky, add water at the right strike temp (thanks Promash) do a couple of loads of washing, mow the lawn etc. for 60 minutes and sparge. Initially I was going to batch sparge, however the setup I have just happen to lead to continuous sparge as the flow was so slow out of the mash tun. I'm not sure of my efficiency as I didn't want to overload my simple brain with too much all at once. The final result is that I now have a beer fermenting quite happily in my brew cupboard.

I'll add the recipe I used:

4.8 kg Joe White pale malt
0.3 kg wheat
0.75 kg English Crystal malt.

27g Centennial hops 9.9 alpha 60 minite boil
15g Fuggles hops 4.6 alpha 15 minute boil
15g Fuggles hops 4.6 alpha end of boil 5 minutes rest.

Yeast: Muntons Gold Ale yeast.

OG 1.048

The only difference from my extract brewing recipe and this AG recipe is the Joe White and wheat malts. The rest is something I picked up from an internet recipe that I have made three times with extract brewing - with slight differences: I don't like to make too many changes from one recipe to another - it makes it easy to taste the differences.

For my next all grain I am open to suggestions form the forum as to what changes I can make to my current recipe and your thoughts on what I have "constructed" My first thought on this is to change the yeast to SAFALE S-04 which, (and I am very happy to be corrected on this) seems to suit my "English Pale Ale" style that I have made.

Over to the Gurus

regards

Steve ( I now have my "L" plates)

[post="101526"][/post]​

The results are finally in. I tried my first bottle of this fine beer yesterday, along with the assistance of Weizguy and his fine sense of taste. The beer has a distinct Fuggles nose along with toffee and dark caramel aromas. The taste was very similar. The crystal effect wasn't as over powering as I thought it would be, though I think this was toned down by the bitterness levels (approx 38 IBU's).

Also tasted my second AG as well. This was a similar style but with only 300 g of Crystal and an experiment with the hops: I used equal portions of Fuggles and EKG (7.5 g each) in lieu of the 15 g Fuggles. The end result was much less toffee and dark caramel (in fact heaps less) due the reduced amount of crystal and a much softer (if that's the term I could use) hop aroma and taste. The EKG seemed to tone down the earthiness of the fuggles and give it a more floral taste and aroma.

I think for next English ale I'll be reducing the crystal to about 150g, sticking with the fuggle/EKG hopping and using a London ale yeast (1028). I'll post tasting results when they happen.

Anyway, thank you Weizguy and his lovely wife for providing me the feedback from my first AG tasting.

Steve

 

[browndog]

Jazzafish,
would not the use of cascade give you an APA rather than an english bitter?

cheers

Browndog

 

[cubbie]

Did my firt All Grain on the weekend and it could not have gone much smoother.

To start with I did an APA witch Chinook, Cascade and Amarillo.

Need to work on my volume calculations in terms of evap rates and loss to kettle etc, but appart from that it was pretty smooth sailing.

After reading the water to grain , grain to water thread, I decided to underlet and had zero dough balls (just over 6kg of grain 3:1 ratio water/grain).

the whole process was much cleaner and shorter than my previous partial mash recipees.

Needless to say I am a happy man.

 

[stephen]

Did my firt All Grain on the weekend and it could not have gone much smoother.

To start with I did an APA witch Chinook, Cascade and Amarillo.

Need to work on my volume calculations in terms of evap rates and loss to kettle etc, but appart from that it was pretty smooth sailing.

After reading the water to grain , grain to water thread, I decided to underlet and had zero dough balls (just over 6kg of grain 3:1 ratio water/grain).

the whole process was much cleaner and shorter than my previous partial mash recipees.

Needless to say I am a happy man.

[post="110215"][/post]​

Good on ya Cubbie. Now comes the fun part of learning what all the various grains are and how they can alter your brew and different ways of mashing etc.

Steve