I’m having a go at an extract brew today. My aim is a simple hop forward American IPA. I used the Kit & Extract Beer Designer from the Aussie Home Brewer forum to design the beer. The beer includes the following ingredients.

1.5KG Briess CBW Golden Light LME
0.5KG Light DME
0.3KG Brown Sugar
Briess Light Crystal Malt 0.25KG
21g Simcoe @ 60 mins 14%AA
21g Simcoe @ 5 mins 14%AA
48g Simcoe dry hopped after 4 days for 3 days.
11g SAFALE US-05 Dry Yeast

Brew Type : 3 Gallon Extract

Simcoe hops pellets, Bairds Crystal Malt, Bairds LME, Brown Sugar, Yeast

OG: 1.068
FG: 1.014
ABV: 7.4%

I chose a single hop recipe with a decent late boil addition and dry hop to bring out the piney/fruit aromas of the American Simcoe hop. It was a little expensive ($12 for 90g) but I think it’s better to go for quality.

Method:

1. Steep the crystal malt in 1L of 65-70C water for 30 minutes.

Steeping the Crystal

2. Drain into boil pot and sparge with 1L of 65-70C water.
3. Make up boil pot to 5L and bring to boil switch off and add 400g of DME mixing to make sure it dissolves fully.
4. Put heat back on and bring to rolling boil. When boiling make first hop addition. Boil for 55 minutes and make second addition. Boil for a further 5 minutes before plunging pot into ice bath to bring down to 20-25C.

First Hop Addition – Smells Good!

5. While wort is boiling bring 2L of water to boil and dissolve remainder of DME and brown sugar and cool rapidly in ice water.
6. Pour cooled wort, cooled sugar/DME solution and LME into FV. Add cooled water to bring volume to 12L.

Aerated wort at 24C prior to pitching yeast.

7. Pitch yeast at 20-25C, seal FV, put airlock in place and commence fermenting.

I ended up getting the wort to 24C in the FV. I took a gravity reading (1.071) which wasn’t too far off target and pitched the yeast. After the FV was sealed I put the airlock in place and moved the vessel to my temperature controlled refrigerator. Set temperature was 18.5C.

Fermentation Notes

I’ve only used the US-05 yeast once and it was slow to start. The reading I’ve done suggests that’s fairly common and that it can be sped up by re-hydrating it before pitching. This brew showed the first signs of active fermentation after about 12-18 hours with the barest hint of a krausen ring appearing on the inside of the vessel. The airlock became active sometime between 24 and 36 hours after pitching the yeast. The fermentation fridge smells like pine trees!

24/5/15

Made up a muslin bag, sterilised it and half a dozen marbles (for ballast) in StarSan. Put 48g of Simcoe hops and the marbles in the bag tied it off and dropped it into the fermentation vessel. You can see the hop bag sinking in the image below.

48g of Simcoe pellets sinking into the beery depths.

Took sample at same time and measured gravity at 1.018, four points above target. OG was 3 points above target so I wonder if I got more un-fermentable sugars from the crystal than expected. Will measure again when bottling. Drank the sample, it had a lot more odour and flavour from the hops than I was expecting. Very piney/resinous on the nose without much fruit. Will be interesting to see if the dry hopping adds more fruit. Not unpleasant at all for a warm, flat half glass of beer!

Current plan is to fine with gelatin on 28/5/15 29-5-15 and cold crash for three days before bottling on 2/6/15.

29/5/15 9:00AM – Mixed half a teaspoon of gelatin into 100mL of 70C water and stirred until completely dissolved. Dropped the lot into the fermentation vessel. The FV was at 14.5C. I’ve turned on the refrigerator and will cold crash until next Tuesday (2/6/15) and will bottle then. I need to work out the bulk priming rate before then.

Bottling

3/6/15 – After 5 days of cold crashing I bottled this brew today. Mixed 65g of brown sugar with 250mL of water and brought to the boil to dissolve. Add the sugar water to my bottling container and then racked off the FV to the bottling container ensuring a good swirl so that the sugar was well mixed. Bottled into 12 750mL PET and 1 500mL glass bottles, with about 400mL left over for SG testing and drinking! Yield was a bit under 11L which isn’t great. Final SG was 1.018 at 5C, which included the priming sugar. Once corrected for temperature and the sugar the FG was 1.015, only two points from estimate, so things have fermented out nicely.

There was a huge passionfruit aroma from the dry hopping, even my young kids who hate the smell of beer commented on how strong the passionfruit was. The sample was a dark amber with a strong mouth feel, strong malt, which tempered the lingering bitterness. It was, in short, delicious. Easily the best brew I’ve done to date! The beer had no real clarity so I don’t perceive any benefit of using the gelatin to fine the beer. However, this could be due to the fact that when I steeped the crystal malt I only strained it with a fine colander which could easily lead to fine particulates in suspension. Next time I’ll make sure to steep the grains in a muslin bag and see if that helps with clarity.

As an aside I harvested some of the trub and put it into a sterilised glass jar with cooled boiled water. I’ve put it in the fridge to keep the yeast dormant. I plan to make a starter from this and pitch this into my next brew. As a note to myself I’ll make the starter from 1L of water with 100g of LDME. You can see an image of the jar below.

Harvested Yeast/Trub

And here it is after 12 hours in the cold to settle out:

Harvested Yeast after 12 Hours

I saw this recipe for English dry apple cider on HomeBrewTalk and thought it looked interesting (and I like cider). It’s a long term brew with people saying the cider only comes good sometime after the four month mark. The recipe itself uses store bought clear apple juice, yeast nutrient, and ale yeast. It also makes use of an acid (lime juice) and steeped black tea for the tannins. The cider seemed like a good (and easy) recipe for a smaller test batch and the only real cost to me would be the apple juice. I am switching out the lime juice with lemon juice (as we have tree in fruit), there’s English black tea bags in the pantry and I have a packet of (unknown) ale yeast from a brew can. There’s no “yeast nutrients” on hand but some Googling suggests that plain old bread yeast boiled in water for 10 minutes works well as a substitute. Finally, it’s coming up to winter here and I can leave the fermentation vessel and secondary outside and not worry too much about temperature control. So, it’s all systems go!

Recipe
6L of store bought clear apple juice
The juice of half a small lemon
2 cups of water
7g packet of baking yeast
1 English black tea bag
Packet of ale brewing yeast

Boil a cup of water with the juice of a lemon for 10 minutes. Turn off heat, steep tea bag in hot mixture for 7 minutes. In another saucepan boil a cup of water with the packet of bakers yeast for 10 minutes. Let both mixtures cool to room temperature and tip both in fermentation vessel. Pour in apple juice making sure to get plenty of air into the mixture. Pitch the yeast, seal FV and let it ferment. Rather than use an airlock on my FV this time I’ve used a large rubber band and several layers of cling (GLAD or Saran) wrap to seal the top of the vessel. Apparently this works well and I can see what’s going on for once as my vessels are all opaque plastic. I didn’t take an SG reading as there’s not enough depth. I doubt I’ll bother except perhaps when I move it to a secondary. Expected FG is 1.000 or a bit less (it is DRY cider after all).

I plan on leaving it in the primary for a month, then into a secondary for another month or two before bulk priming and bottling.

30 May 2015 – I washed and sterilised the juice bottles today and racked off the cider from the fermenter into the bottles for aging for a couple of months. You can see the cider below. The bottle on the left was racked first and is quite clear, the bottle on the right was last and is quite cloudy. I tasted a little of the cider. On the nose it was quite a strong apple scent but had little apple flavour. It was extremely dry and the mouth feel and after taste was very reminiscent of dry white wine. There was a strong flavour of alcohol. I took an SG measurement at 1.004.

Cider racked into original 2L juice bottles

Update 18 July 2015

It’s been nearly two months since I started aging the cider. I put a bottle in the fridge today to cool and have had a glass back sweetened a little with regular apple juice. It is smooth and has a strong apple flavour. The dryness has dropped off a little and the dry harshness I noted a couple of months ago has gone. It’s also dropped out extremely clear. I guess because it’s flat it’s apple scrumpy. I’ll carbonate the other four liters and see how they turn out.