Star Fox Brew - Red Ale with Galaxy Hops

[Foxfire]

So the wife and I are brewing under the house name of Nimbus Brewery - Cloudy with a chance of ale.

And I've always liked Star Fox - the main character of which is called Fox McCloud. We recently did a brew of some red ale that was amazing, so I wanted to combine all these things.

The goal is to use all the puns and links together and hopefully get a decent tasting beer at the end. So I've absolutely no idea how the taste of these things will match, just hoping I get lucky. Not to mention it being simple as it's the first thing I'll be splashing together.

Galaxy Hops - Obviously the link to galaxy and stars there
Fox McCloud - Linking to Nimbus Brewery
Red ale - foxes are red (well orange, but I wanted a nice red ale so I'm going with that).

We downloaded the Beersmith 2 trial version and started adding things and playing with the colour. I think I've got everything I need - but I'm a not sure about the spec grains and what I can use. I think I've got way too much, but the picture has the colour I'm after. Before I started adding ingredients, I was hoping to hit around 20 IBU with an ABV around 5-5.5% or so.

With that in mind I started plugging stuff into Beersmith.

1 kg Crystal 40L Steeped
1 kg Dark Dry Extract
2 kg Light Dry Exract
Galaxy Hops

• 15g Boil for 40mins
• 15g Boil for 20mins
• 30g dry hopped at day 4 of ferment

Safale US-05 Yeast

So I plugged that in, adjusting values till I got the beer colour I wanted. It actually worked out to be fairly close to my IBU and ABV.
Beersmith is telling me that it should be 21.6 IBU and 5.3% ABV with a 1.053 OG and 1.012 FG.
The arrows are sitting all in the middle of the green so it should be right for an Irish Ale.

So to get to the point (finally), what I'm wondering is whether I should make any changes? Use different steep, mix in more types of grains? Do I need to add dextrose, or is that just if I want a higher ABV at the end? I've also gone with 30g dry hop as I read someone it should be about 1.something gms per litre and this will be 23 litres in the fermenter.

Thanks.

Edit: argh, Beersmith was being weird and clicky and things have changed, apparently it slipped up to 25L without me noticing.
At 23L
O.G - 1.049
F.G - 1.012
IBU - 23.4
ABV - 5.0%

 

[Johnny Ringo]

Personally I would up the ibu but that's just my taste buds!

Sounds great though! Keep us updated with the progress!

 

[indica86]

Yes, for me very low IBU, Actually I made Better Red Than Dead and that is perfectly balanced and comes in at 24 IBU so yours looks good,.

 

[Foxfire]

Yeah, personally I'd got 40-60 IBU, but I've got a couple of friends that aren't as big a fan of the high bitterness so I thought I'd go for a more well rounded one. Then crank it up later on different brews.

 

[menoetes]

I love the pun and tribute as an old-school Star Fox fan myself. I played the hell out of that game on the Super Nintendo.

 

[Foxfire]

So for anyone wondering about the tasting notes and things the recipe I used was slightly modified from the above with the steeped grains and such.

But it's now four weeks in the bottle and tasting brilliant. So good it got 1st place in the bitter category and also took out Best in show for all beers at the show in the Samford Show Homebrew contest that was on this weekend (Samford is a small town outside of Brisbane). Which has me well chuffed! I can now honestly say I have a double award winning beer

 

[Foxfire]

Couldn't find my recipe notes, but have found the order receipt so update recipe ingredients below as it was a bit different from the first post.


500 g Carared Malt (Weyermann)
500 g Caramalt Dark malt (Thomas Fawcett)
1 kg Dark Dry Malt
2 kg Light Dry Malt
30g Galaxy at 40mins of the boil
30g Galaxy dry hopped at 4 days
Wyeast 1056 Liquid Yeast - American Ale

I'd be interested to know if I could drop the grain totals and get the same result as it ended up like porridge in the steeping pot, I rinsed the grains with extra water, but it feels like I was doing that bit wrong.