brew #001: cluster#$%* pale ale

Finally got the guts and time to whip together my first homebrew. Instead of doing a full 5 gallon batch as I had originally planned, I scaled down and did an ‘experimental’ one gallon batch. I approached it as a learning experience and definitely learned many valuable lessons on the way, even though my beer is sure to suck.

I decided to stay very simple and only use one variety of hops (cluster, if you couldn’t tell already from the name). Many pictures are included (thanks Jenny!) to fully document this blissful trainwreck, here’s to many more – brews, not trainwrecks. At least the name/logo is cool right? Eh? Eh?

Ingredients

0.70 lb Pale Liquid Extract (8.0 SRM) Extract
0.17 oz Cluster [7.10%] (55 min) Hops 26.7 IBU
0.17 oz Cluster [7.10%] (30 min) Hops 21.3 IBU
0.17 oz Cluster [7.10%] (5 min) Hops 5.5 IBU
0.10 tsp Irish Moss (Boil 10.0 min) Misc
0.10 lb Brown Sugar, Light (8.0 SRM) Sugar
2.00 gal Chicago, IL Water
1 Pkgs American Ale (Wyeast Labs #1056) Yeast-Ale (Propagator smack pack)

Ingredient notes: I attempted to split the use of my pale LME between two batches and got slightly overwhelmed trying to put this one together. In the process I jumbled the amount I added to this batch and tried to compensate by a last minute brown sugar addition. *shrug* My gravity is lower than I had hoped so next time I will work harder to get this worked out right. Also, according to Mr. Malty’s yeast pitching calculator the propagator pack had the perfect cell count to pitch straight in after popping the nutrient pack.

The Brew

Soundtrack: Pittsburg Penguins vs. Carolina Hurricanes

Brew Beer: NONE. I KNOW I’M BREAKING MY RULE. NEVER AGAIN.

I won’t go into this step by step breakdown for each batch but I think it’s worth it for my first (and all of my buddies can study up and get ready for the full scale one).

Sanitation: Too early to confirm but I believe I had a great routine down. Everything was properly sanitised in a dilute bleach bath and then rinsed in a water bath with no rinse cleanser. Used my bottling bucket and fermenter bucket in the tub. Worked great.

Boil: Stove and kettle worked fine. No problems. Until I added real ingredients; got a little tripped up measuring out the LME but I’ll chalk that up to noobism. Good experience tasting and experience the extreme stickiness of LME. Will have a better plan next time. Realized later that I slightly overestimated the boiloff rate of my stove/pot, lesson learned. Hops smelled so good. Incredible. I wish my beer could be better to them.

Cooldown: Water bath in my sink worked great. No issues whatsoever.

Fermentation: Biggest mistake came in the transfer of cooled wort from the kettle to the fermenter. I didn’t lay out the cheesecloth correctly so it did nothing to keep out any hop sludge. Going to buy a real strainer ASAP. The funnel I was using also proved to be awkward since it made a ‘perfect’ vacuum with the vessel so my wort going in was backing up big time. I’ll sort of fix this by transferring the brew to my other 1gal fermenter when it’s time to put on the airlock (thereby removing all the heavy hop sludge).

Stats

Original Gravity: 1.025 (lower than expected)

Final Gravity: 1.005

Est. ABV: 2.6%

IBU: ~54

Color: 6 SRM

Brewed: 5.23.09

Bottled: 5.29.09 (short fermentation because I am anxious to try my first, low + stable FG and tremendous clarity)

This entry was posted on Sunday, May 24th, 2009 at 12:01 am and is filed under brew stats. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.