I've had a couple of weeks off brewing for assorted very good reasons so I'm trying to make up with a couple this week. The first is another go at a blonde ale, and just for fun, it's with ingredients that are all new to me.
- Golden Promise malt
- Bohemian pilsner malt
- Brewers Gold hops
- Hallertauer Hersbrucker hops
- Nottingham yeast
It's a small batch again, and put together with the help of Beersmith as usual, in combination with a bit of research about what makes a blonde ale - in theory this is half pilsner in makeup, which is really what a blonde ale is, an ale for lager drinkers. Pausing only to put on my tin hat, the mash was good and done pretty much to plan, although I've found that preheating the Esky still doesn't guarantee a stable temperature for the length of a mash, with a small batch at least, but I suppose that's probably as much physics as the reliability of an Esky. Anyway, passing about 11 litres of liquor through yielded about 8 litres of wort at an SG of 1040 or so. I scheduled a light body boil of 90 minutes with Brewers Gold at the start of boil, Hallertauer at 45 mins, and a teaspoonful of Hallertauer for an aroma steep. For some reason a 90 minute boil seems to lose considerably more wort than a 60 minute boil so I ended up with about four and a half litres of wort that now clocked in at a chewy 1060, so I added a litre of water to bring it down but it's still probably going to be stronger than the 4% that I was aiming for. I pitched a half packet of Nottingham and now the half bucket of beer is by my desk bubbling away happily. I'll transfer to secondary on Friday or thereabouts and should get eight or nine bottles out of it in a couple of weeks. I sometimes wonder why I called myself a bathtub brewer as I don't even seem to manage to make enough to fill a sink...