My 2nd collaboration brew with buddy Pete has been some time in the making….we had planned to get it done before Christmas, but we just couldn’t make it happen. Pete finally got his act together earlier this week and dropped over for a brew-night.
I was looking forward to doing this one with Pete…our last collaboration, the Kilcarney Irish Ale, had turned out really well, and that was “despite” it being a pretty simple K&K brew, with no boil, using the Coopers kit yeast, and brewed in my cupboard as I hadn’t yet procured the brewfridge. I think the Kilcarney was a great example of how you can make really good beer, really easily. I participate on home brew forums a lot these days, and many “holier than thou” all-grain brewers steadfastly refuse to believe you can make good beer unless you do it their way. In reality it seems that they couldn’t make good beer before moving to AG, and now they’ve spent a heap of cash on the ability to mash/sparge/lauter, perform full volume boils and then cool their wort, they simply don’t want to believe you can make great beer without all that equipment! There’s no doubt AG gives you an enormous level of granularity to tweak your malt, via different grain types and amounts, mash temperatures and the like….and there’s many styles of beer you simply can’t make well using kits, or even full extract for that matter. But there are plenty of beer styles that lend themselves very well to nothing more than a can of concentrated wort, a bag of “brew enhancer” and a well-suited packet of dry yeast. And of course once you’ve made the equipment investment, AG brewing can be significantly cheaper than making beer with kits. Mind you, when you’re making $15 a slab kit beer that’s better than the megaswill rubbish you used to pay $40 a slab for, it’s all relative!
Back to the Amber Ale. I chose the Foxxy Cleopatra name ‘coz this brew is an American Amber Ale…and if there’s anyone American and amber that’s hotter than Beyonce Knowles as Foxxy in Goldmember, I’m yet to know about it. This brew was a 10 litre boil, using steeped grain…the usual Crystal 120, but also some super-dark Carafa Special III…a de-husked malted grain that adds a huge amount of colour to your wort, without imparting any significant dark flavour or bitterness to the brew that can come with dark grain.
It was good to show Pete this more complex process for making beer, as it helped me in having to explain each step, and it’s always good to have a second opinion and another set of hands and eyes to get it done. It all went really well, although we did have some head scratching going on when trying to take an Original Gravity (OG) reading. I initially filled my hydrometer tube, and the wort measured a whopping 1090. I knew this was mad, as we were expecting something closer to 1050. So I ditched the sample (after sharing a taste with Pete of course), and took another from the tap. Again it was up around 1090. I decided I must be getting some hop gunk coming through the tap, so instead I sanitised the hydrometer, and dropped it directly into the fermenter. This time it read 1010! We finally came to realise that because we’d poured the concentrated wort out of the kettle (3.5kg of malt in only 10 litres of water), then topped up the fermenter with 15 litres of tap water….the tap water hadn’t blended fully with the boiled wort….and in fact was sitting on top of it. It makes sense when you think about it…but I still find it strange as I don’t remember it happening before. Regardless, we sanitised the big stirring spoon, and I got stuck into mixing it all together. Popped the hydrometer back in, and sure enough a much more realistic reading of 1048. Another lesson learned….
Carnie Brewing 