Brew Day - American Pale Ale

     The American Pale Ale style is what has defined the craft beer scene  in America since the 80's, with the balance of pure malt and the caramelly crystal malt flavours infused with the fresh piney, citrusy notes of American hops such as Amarillo and Cascade.

STYLE GUIDELINES

Flavour : fresh hops plus a nutty maltiness with hints of raisins and / or caramel
Aroma : malty, fruity with American (Cascade or similar ) hops in the foreground
Balance : medium body, crisp bitter finish
Seasonality : year round
Pair with : classic with a burger and chips

Starting Gravity : 1.044 - 1.060
Alcohol : 4.5 - 5.5%
Body : medium
Colour : dark gold to dark amber
Bitterness : 28 - 40 IBU medium to high

      Now that we have our style guidelines we can look at our recipe and adjust it to match if need be, we start with a base of pale malt (87%) add some pale crystal malt (9.5%) for colour and caramel / raisin notes and some rolled oats (3.5%) for mouth feel and body. Oat malt would be better to use but finding it is a bit of a task and rolled oats are fairly similar.
     Our alcohol and body are going to be set by our mashing temps, keeping them down at about 61 - 63*c will give us a very dry beer with high alcohol and conversly keeping them at 67 - 70*c will give us a beer with massive body and lower alcohol. We aim for 63 - 65*c for most of the mash then up it at the very end to 70*c to ensure we have full conversion of the sugars.
     Bitterness is not transfered from the person brewing it  but from the Alpha Acids ( AA) in the hops. We have used 15gm of Amarillo and 15gm of Hallertau. (yes I know Hallertau are not American )

The calculation is

hop quantity in gm x Alpha acid% x utilisation% x correction factor (0.55) = predicted IBU

Utilisation is a factor of boil time verses wort gravity
Correction factor brings it into IBU's

So for the Amarillo  15 x 8.9 x 14% x 0.55 = 10.28 IBU
for the Hallertau       15 x 4.7 x 14% x 0.55=  5.43 IBU

for a total of 15.71 IBU

So this means theres not enough bitterness in this recipe and if entered into a comp probably would not do to well, but for us it will do, overly bitter beers just arn't our thing.

    Now to the brew day itself, I was on my own for the day which for the most part is ok it's just sitting around watching a temperature gauge and hoping that the rain wont reach to far under the carport as the mash was under way and everything was to hot to move. All went well until it was time to sparge out the brew in a bag, holding 10kg plus of wet dripping grain while trying to fix the strainer underneath is no easy task I can tell you (I suppose with hindsight I could of put the bag down on a tray but I just didn't think of it)
     With that messy sticky task done it was time to boil and once boiling away, time to sanitise the brewers, get the cooling system ready ( bilge pump, cooling coil, esky and battery) go out for ice and lunch then back again for the rest of the boil. I don't know what the neighbours thought with steam rising up for most of the morning and that unmistakable smell of malt and hops. With the boil done and the brew cooling down the clean up started and room made in the fridge it was time to wait again, glad I had my book to read. Once cool it was an easy task to transfer to the fermenter and pitch the yeast, after that it was chuck it in the fridge and clean up, all up from go to woe 6hrs that makes for a full day but the results should be worth it.

Thanks to Tasting Beer for the Style Guidelines and Radical Brewing for the IBU calculations both by Randy Mosher