Bar-None Brown

Today I brewed up a brown ale based roughly on a clone recipe for Dogfish Head India Brown Ale, one of my favorite beers ever. I had originally planned on calling it Bangalore Brown or Bombay Brown, but decided to rename it in honor of my wife/lovely brewing assistant Emily who just found out she passed the bar exam.

I've kind of had a bad day today, influenced by my scale breaking and my mash efficiency being quite poor. But, bellyaching aside, I think this beer might turn out OK.

The Recipe:

11 lb 2-row pale malt
12 oz victory malt
8 oz crystal 60°
8 oz chocolate malt
2 oz roasted barley

1 lb dark brown sugar, added with about 20 minutes left in the boil

13 AAU (28g @ 13% AA) Nugget @ 60
5 AAU (40g @ 3.5% AA) Czech Saaz @ 20
5 AAU (40g @ 3.5% AA) Czech Saaz @ 5

1 Irish Moss tablet @ 15 min

Wyeast 1187 - Ringwood Ale (w/starter)

Single infusion mash for 60 minutes at about 151° using 16 quarts; fly sparged with ~170-190° water until I had about 25 quarts for the boil.

O.G.: 1.068
Est. IBU: 65.9

I learned that 13 pounds of grist and 16 quarts of water are about the maximum my 5-gallon Rubbermaid mash tun will hold. In the future, if I wish to make bigger beers, they will have to be fortified with sugar or DME or something if I don't want to do two mashes for one batch. Today I had a pretty bad 65% mash efficiency; this could be due to my sparge, which was rather faster than normal (about 30-35 minutes instead of the 45-60 territory I usually occupy) or due to a poor crush at the LHBS. Sadly, I really have no way of guaranteeing consistency of the mill.

Today also represented two firsts for me in my homebrew adventures: the use of sugar in a brew and the use of a yeast starter. With my poor efficiency and an OG of only 1.068, a starter may not have been necessary, but at least it was a learning experience. Last week I purchased a growler with matching stopper and an airlock, along with a 3-lb package of light dry malt extract. I boiled 6 oz of extract in 2 quarts of water, cooled it, dumped it into the growler, aerated the wort and pitched the yeast on Tuesday evening. I then let it ferment until Thursday (fermentation activity was subtle and no big kräusen was formed), when I put the batch in the fridge so the yeast could flocculate out of solution. Today, before brewing, I decanted about 95% of the liquid from the growler and then swirled the yeast cake into the remaining small amount of solution and let the whole works come up to room temperature for a couple hours. I then pitched it like I normally would straight from the package ... we'll see if it works.