I haven’t been posting much here recently about my home brewing activities. Actually I haven’t been posting much here about anything. But nevermind. I’m posting now because I just filled up my good old pen and paper notebook and the last half dozen or so brew days are about to be consigned to an archive box so I figured I should really start logging things online again so I can look back at my brew logs more easily.
26 November 2016
Australian Pale ale with Stella / Ella Hops
This was a leftover/bitsa brew. I had a whole packet of Stella / Ella hops (14.6% AA) I wanted to use up. A goal was to keep the grain bill simple, use a single hop, and produce an easy drinking ale.
12.5L BIAB
1.046OG
1.012FG
13.4EBC
32.6IBU
2.6kg Barret Burston 2 Row Ale
0.14kg Crystal Pale 100
US05 SAFALE yeast
15L strike water at 70C with 68C target mash temp. Stir every 20 minutes of mash. At the end of the mash the temperature was 66C. At that point I squeezed the bag and rinsed it with 4L of cold water. This resulted in 18L of pre-boil wort with an SG of 1.027 at 48C. Temperature corected to 1.035.
45 minute boil
5g Ella @ 30 minutes
5g Ella @ 15 minutes
15g Ella @ 5 minutes
1/2 whirlflow @ 5 minutes
20g Ella @ Flameout
No Chill. As usual for my no chill brews I’ve considered all additions later than 10 minutes as 10 minute additions. At the end of the boil I put the wort, boil pot and all into my fridge and let it cool for 18 hours down to my target fermentation temperature of 18C. I cleaned and sterilised my trusty fermenter, dumped the cooled wort into it, at this point I had 14.5L of wort with a measured gravity of 1.046. I aerated the wort with my big old spoon, sprinkled my yeast, put the lid on and put the fermenter back in the fridge to do it’s think for a couple of weeks. I plan to let it ferment out for a week, fine with gelatin, chill for a few days and then bottle.
Fermentation Log
27/11/16 – Set temp of 18C.
28/11/16 – Fermentation appears to have started.
7/12/16 – Fined with Gelatin
9/12/16 – Cold crash to 3C.
11/11/16 – Bottled, bulk primed with 130g of sugar and total yield was 12.2L of beer.
Opened a bottle 7 days later and it was almost fully carbonated with a creamy pale cream head that last nicely and gave good lacing. Aroma was slightly fruity, and colour was a dark amber, quite a bit darker than I expected. The beer was also quite bitter, perhaps slightly out of balance with the malt character. There’s a couple of reasons why it might have seemed bitter, firstly it might be because it actually was, my no chill method sometimes leads to overly bitter beer especially with lots of late hop additions like this one. Alternatively I might have just perceived it as being more bitter because I’ve been drinking beers with lower IBU’s like Munich Helles (IBU 14.2) and Bohemian Pilsner (25 IBU) while this Ale had a predicted IBU of 33. Anyway, I only noticed the bitterness for the first glass, by the second glass my palate had adjusted and I enjoyed it immensely.
Ella Pale Ale
If I was to make this beer again I’d probably drop the late hob additions by 5g each.