Brew Day!Brew Day!

Took my floating holiday from work today and am brewing an Arrogant Bastard clone; the wonder work of Stone Brewing Co. (I’ll add some holiday spices in the secondary to give it a proper Christmas kick.)

Using the following recipe, which I picked up at Homebrew Talk:

  • 11.5 pounds pale two-row malt
  • 1.0 pounds crystal 120
  • 0.5 lb Special-B
  • 0.75 lb Biscuit
  • 0.5 lb Aromatic
  • 0.5 lb CaraMunich
  • 1.25 oz chinook pellets (12.5 aa%) (15.6 AAUs) @ 90 min
  • 1.0 oz chinook pellets (12.5 AAUs) @ 30 min
  • 0.5 oz chinook pellets (6.25 AAUs) @ flame out
  • 1 tsp Irish moss
  • White Labs WLP007 or WLP001 (English Ale Yeast)

Preparation:
Mash at 155 degrees for 60 minutes. Boil for 90 minutes, adding the hops according to schedule. Add Irish Moss last 5 minutes of the boil. Cool wort and pitch yeast. Primary ferment at about 68 F for 7 to 10 days. Secondary fermentation optional. 

Specifics:
Style Strong Ale
Recipe Type All Grain
Batch Size 5 gallons
Original Gravity 1.074
Final Gravity 1.018
Boiling Time 90 minutes
Primary Fermentation Glass, ~ 68 F, 7-10 days
Secondary Fermentation optional
Other Specifics 75 IBUs, about 7% abv.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Related Post

Outdoor BrewOutdoor Brew

Spent part of Monday brewing outdoors. The first time I’ve done that. I purchased a Blichmann floor burner from Grape and Granary a few years back and just hadn’t gotten around to using it; well, now I can say that I have.

The burner is fantastic and connects to a propane tank. It puts out 72,000 BTU’s per hour which translates to a whole lot of heat for fast boils. I am used to brewing in my kitchen where I use a standard gas range. The time to boil was a great delay in the brew day for me. After lautering and sparging and collecting the wort into the boil kettle, the time from that 160 or so degrees to 212 was too much. It could take nearly an hour just to get to boil. I didn’t time things out specifically, but I would swear that the Blichmann was heating water at around 10 degrees every five minutes, maybe even faster. So in approximately twenty to twenty-five minute it was boiling. It happened so fast, in fact, that I had my first boil over in years, even with fermcap. But it was outdoors, so only the ants were pissed (and me later, when I had to scrub the pot).

Another upshot with outdoor brewing is that I just ran the hose to the kettle and used the hose to connect to the Blichmann plate chiller that I have. The excess water that comes in chilling the wort went straight into the garden beds for the very thirsty pumpkins, cucumbers, and peppers. The main drawback was that the water temperature was very difficult to get down, with the nearly 100 degree heat, so I could only chill the wort to 77 degrees, which is a bit high for pitching (but I did it anyway).

I brewed a Brown Ale with lots of Cascade and Nugget hops. The Nugget came straight from my backyard, circa 2011 (vacuum sealed in the freezer). It was a low gravity extract beer which I am using as a yeast starter (essentially) for an all-grain Imperial Red (Nosferatu clone) that I’ll brew in a week or two.

Recent brew sessionRecent brew session

Thought I’d throw up a few of the shots from my most recent brew session–the Arrogant Bastard clone.

Photo descriptions

The first is the 10-gallon water cooler that I use as my mash/lauter tun. It’s upside down in the picture drying out after I washed it. There’s a couple of shots of the brew in the kettle as it simmers: anticipating the rolling boil to come. I’ve got a shot of the counter top with the Chinook pellet hops in their respective hop socks: the first, on the left is the 90 minute, then 30, then flame out. There’s also a bag of Whirlfloc tablets and Irish Moss. I only used the Whirlfloc. You can also see my digital scale and a small white bottle of Fermcap (anti-foam)–oh, and cookies! I’ve got a shot of my Therminator plate chiller which I’ll talk about soon in another article, as well as a shot of the Thrumometer which allows me to keep tabs on the temperature of the wort after it exits the plate chiller on its way to the fermentation bucket. Good stuff.

Conclusion

The OG of the Arrogant Bastard was 1.084 which is good, but given the recipe I used demonstrates my continued problem of low efficiency in my process. The one sure area of my brewing process on which I want to improve.

Old Christmas BastardOld Christmas Bastard

That’s what I named my Christmas beer. It’s a pretty good beer. The main detractor from the Christmas beer was that when I Christmassed it, I over bittered. The beer is an Arrogant Bastard clone, and so is sufficiently bitter already. Then I added the orange peel and curacao (along with everything else), which sealed the deal. Consequently, I had to sweeten it with 4oz of milk sugar (lactose). It worked very nicely, the beer has a sweet front end and a very balanced bitter finish. Bitterness does pass with time, so it was important not to over-compensate on the sweet side.

Old Christmas Bastard was well-received by friends and family and all that remains is three twenty-two ounce bullets. In addition, I entered the beer in the Wizard of Saaz competition which concluded recently, and, unfortunately, by some cosmic mistake, the beer was not judged in the competition. The message from Mike Yingling read, partially, as there was a “screw up in the cellar. The beer was on the pull sheet but the stewards & cellar master must have made a mistake. I’m very sorry your beer was not judged.” However, I am far more interested the evaluation of the beer, and Mike emailed to tell me that it would be reviewed and the results sent.

So, there goes the first competition; but that was the first for me. There will be many more, now. I’m very interested in getting the feedback on my beers as, when you brew for a long time, as I have, you get into certain habits of approach to the brewing process. I try as much as I can to read and adjust and experiment, but at the end of the day my brew session is to get the beer brewed so I can drink it! Competitions will help point out areas that are weak and push me in the direction of exploring more intensely the questions of the process.