Monday, May 21, 2012

Pale In the Books, and the Porter's Worse

As the title suggests, I brewed the first iteration of the Pale this weekend.  It was an extremely simple recipe, using only one type of malt (American Pale Ale), and one type of hop (Willamette).  I still have that problem getting good efficiency in the mash.  I've tried a few different things to bump it up, but I can't get above 63%...F'ing annoying.  I am trying to decide if it really matters enough to try and fix anymore, or if I should just accept it, and scale the recipes accordingly when I move to 5 or 10 gallon batches.  For this beer, I also gave the whole "Late-Hop-The-Crap-Out-Of-It" thing, doubling the amount of hops from the bitterring addition in both the flavor and aroma steps.  Not that it's really that tough, But here's the recipe:

2.5lbs American Pale Ale Malt
0.2oz Willamette @ 60 min
0.4oz Willamette @ 15 min
0.4oz Willamette @ 5 min
5g Safale US-05

I also tried the second Porter experiment, and didn't like it as much as the first.  The subtraction of a chunk of the Black Patent malt decreased the sharpness that I was looking to lose, but also seems to have thinned out the flavor too much; the Crystal 120 added some darker fruit flavors and subtle sweetness, but seemed too light for the overall impression of the beer.  I think, in the next one, brewing this weekend, I will go back to the original amount of Black Patent, and go with a different malt to sweeten it up, maybe Special-B?

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