Here we go again! This time I decided to brew an Irish Amber. I put together a recipe using a 70/30 mix of 2-row pale malt and wheat malt with some different grades of Crystal malt and a little Special B for color. The shop didn't have the hops I had originally planned, so I'm trying some varieties that are new to me. I constructed a new mash tun out of a 10gal cube cooler and installed a home built square copper sparge manifold in the bottom. There shouldn't be any stuck sparges this time. I heated the initial strike water to 162F and conducted the mash for 60 minutes. The cooler kept the temp stable and I only dropped 4 degrees in the hour. We heated sparge water to 172F and began to lauter the wort. The first runnings were recycled and then a beautiful deep amber wort began to flow into the boil kettle. I added about half of my finishing hops (Liberty pellets at 3.7%) to the kettle before hand for a First Wort Hopping(FWH). The lauter process went a little slow since the is the first use of the new tun. It took a little over an hour. The wort went on the stove and began to boil. We had about 6.25gal collected. About 15mins after the hot break I added Styrian Goldings (4.5%) to the boil and then the rest of the liberty and some Irish moss 45mins after the break. At 60 mins after hot break, we moved the kettle into ice water and fired up the wort chiller. I pitched a White Labs Irish Ale and about 18 hours later had a nice bubble going on the fermentation lock. I didn't get much kraeusun in the sample bottle until the next morning. Now we wait...
edit: Here're the photos from bottling this batch. We decided to start ranching the yeast and got two pints of starter to save for next time. |
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