After a month of other commitments, the barrels and fermenters were empty, so I spent much of this past weekend brewing, knocking off my 10th and 11th batches of all-grain brew since I did the course in April.
The first was a second pass at my blonde ale recipe. I slightly tweaked the grain bill to put a little more wheat malt in, in search of head retention. And I changed the hopping slightly. The first was good, but I'd like to do something more than straight cascades. So we'll see how that turns out. I got OG of 1044 vs target of 1046, which I absolutely nailed last time. Makes me pretty sure I know the efficiency of my set-up.
And then on Sunday I brewed a batch of Poor Richard's Ale, which is a commemorative brew for Ben Franklin's tercentenary (recipe) - pdf. Seemed a fitting tribute. Also proved a bit of a challenge. I was early to rise to make this one, as we had other plans for the afternoon.
This is the biggest beer I've ever brewed, in terms of target OG. I learned the hard way that it's really too big a beer for my mash tun; I just can't handle that much grain. I knew it would be tight, but what it meant was a low recovery (I missed the target OG of 1068 by 16 points despite a textbook sparge). I also revisited the need to raise the strike heat for the mash-in because the grain bill is large and the water level is low. In this case, I wound up first adding some boiling water from the kettle until the tun was full and then rotating three batches of the mash liquid through a saucepan and raising the heat slowly up to about 150F (target 154). At least once I got it there, it more or less stayed there. I finished at 148F.
Apart from that, the brew went well. It smells wonderful. I've never brewed with corn before, so it will be interesting to see the effect this has on the body and flavour. I had to make some mods to the original recipe, substituting brown malt for both the biscuit and special roast malt. I also didn't use the recommended yeast since it's not available in my local shop. I figured that since it called for an English Ale yeast and there's no shortage of those around here, I'd just use what I could find, which was Danstar Nottingham from Lallemand (so, a Canadian English Ale yeast...a bit like coals to Newcastle!).
So, I mucked with the grain bill, mucked with the yeast and I'll miss the target alcohol by about 2%. Okay, then, it's not really Poor Richard's Ale, is it? Still, not to worry, as ol' Ben used to say, "Who is rich? He that rejoices in his Portion." Two fermenters thripping away and two weeks away from joy