The intention for this beer was a pale ale with NZ hops. I don't want to say an NZ pale as I wasn't sure of my small antipodean hop stash, so the recipe was this:
- Maris Otter - 47.2%
- Pilsner - 47.2%
- Torrified wheat - 4.7%
- Crystal dark - 0.9%
- Hallertauer Aroma - 15.8 IBU - Boil 30 min
- Pacifica - 3.3 IBU - Boil 15 min
- Wakatu - 3.6 IBU - Boil 15 min
- Pacifica - 2.6 IBU - Boil 5 min
- Wakatu - 2.8 IBU - Boil 5 min
- Hallertauer Aroma - 3.0 IBU - Steep 30 min
- Pacifica - 2.6 IBU - Steep 30 min
- Wakatu - 2.8 IBU - Steep 30 min
- Safale American US-05
- Leftover hops dry hopped for 4 days
The total IBU came to 33.8 and I used the Beersmith profile for Australian Pale Ale.
I brewed this as our traditional two weeks of summer ended and the temperature dropped by to 18-19 degrees C. The mash and boil went with no problems and I came once again to my bugbear, chilling. I had the counterflow chiller set up correctly and I can safely say, just using water out of the outside tap and draining the boiler at the slowest rate possible, the temperature can drop by a good 40 - 50 degrees. The only problem is that even after 30 minutes steeping and cooling, this still means that the wort is going into the fermenter at 30 degrees C, and that's still too much for US-05 even after standing for another hour.
After a week in the fermenter the beer had got down to about 1014, the target in secondary, so I transferred and dry hopped with the rest of the hops from the 100g packs and left it for another five days before bottling.
Another thing here was the choice of hops. I bought the Hallertauer Aroma a couple of years ago in the throes of Idiot Glee (and probably because it was cheap) and then got the Wakatu and Pacifica last year. Doing a bit of research I found that Hallertauer Aroma was renamed Wakatu last year. So this is a beer with about 75% of the same hop of differing vintages, and it's all low alpha. I did do a bit of research and this was deliberate so in theory it should have been all flavour and quite a low bitterness. Many of you will note that 33.8 IBU is actually fairly high, and yes, out of primary there was a lemony sharpness but the dry hopping added little more.
I filled three minikegs with 15g each of sugar for carbonation and bottled the rest with what I estimated I need for about 30 litres. I actually got 32 500ml bottles out. I opened a keg (on which more later) after a week and it was not too bad but slightly undercarbonated, and have tried a couple of bottles this weekend and they gush if not chilled but have a heavy hint of DME, which from experience should go after another couple of weeks and seems to be an artefact of pitching US-05 too hot. It has also come out as about 80% 'generic beer', a sort of brown plasticine of homebrew that tastes like beer but is clearly not good beer, possibly through poor storage of hops on top of everything else. On the positive side, I actually have beer, so the next step is to improve cooling (again) and improve temperature control in fermentation. This is easy enough with 25L batches but needs some rethinking when you get bigger. So the next step may be to get smaller again.