What are you brewing?

[nzbrewer]

Since this is the most popular thread on the RealBeer.co.nz forum I thought I would start it here just to see what happens

[jt]

I toyed with the ANZAC theme and couldn't make up my mind, but by chance brewing with Southern Cross on the day.

Would normally brew Sunday, but we're off to the world gumboot record of some sort at Te Papa Sunday morning.

[denimglen]

I was thinking of going ANZAC themed as well, ANZAC biscuitish beer or something.

Decided to brew a Hobgoblin clone (yeap another clone! Wanna get my technique better before desiging my own recipes). I've never tasted the stuff but the recipe looks the goods.

[Dan]

Let me know what you think of your homegrown, glen!
Im surprised you harvested enough for a brew in your first year.

[denimglen]

Will do, the brew's sitting in the fermenter at the moment. I've brewed it the same as a recipe I've brewed before to see how they come out, smells very good so far.

I think I managed to harvest 90g in total.

Will have to send ya down a couple of bottles as a thank you.

Cheers and beers!

[Dan]

Must be that Auckland weather, I harvested something like 12 hops the first year, this year thousands, 8 hours of picking.

Would be keen as to try some of your brew, ive never tasted anyone elses efforts before, except for kits of course.

It would be interesting to to hear how you compare your hops to nelson grown cascades, which the seed came from, I can send you some of mine for a comparison test if you like.

[denimglen]

Yeah, it was warm summer here. Also we had an irrigation system hooked up for the rest of the garden so I used that as well. It was getting watered every night and every second morning. Maybe a little too much but the plants seemed fine. The water bill for that period was scary though.

Yeah, would be awesome to do a swap if you're keen, will be in touch once the brew's ready.

[Gullyman]

Going to try for a Kolsch this weekend;

4.00 kg Pilsner (2 Row) Bel (2.0 SRM) Grain 81.63 %
0.45 kg Cara-Pils/Dextrine (2.0 SRM) Grain 9.18 %
0.45 kg Wheat Malt, Bel (2.0 SRM) Grain 9.18 %

40.00 gm Hallertauer [6.20 %] (60 min) Hops 26.8 IBU
10.00 gm Saaz B (Motueka) [7.20 %] (10 min) Hops 2.5 IBU
10.00 gm Saaz B (Motueka) [7.20 %] (3 min) Hops 0.9 IBU

Kolsch Yeast (Wyeast Labs #2565)

The fridge is looking bare and it needs feeding!

Posh new forum by the way.

Tim

[Edward Siddle]

looks like a superb recipe to me gullyman, good luck! i quite liked that yeast last time i used it, and i used it both for a few koeln-style beers and also a couple of alts which it worked surprisingly well in, with a bit of maturing. rich and spicy, although started a bit winey to begin.

[Richard Walley]

OK, after a long leave of absence due to various hard-to-control outside factors, we're now ready to run at brew number 2. This is going to be exactly the same as brew number 1, except this time I'm going to santisie everything to within an inch of its life and not take the lid off the keg to see what's happening, thus hopefully avoiding the acetobacter infection which plagued brew number 1. I'm also going to remember to take a gravity reading at the start of the process this time. So, the (somewhat mundane) recipe is -

4kg amber malt
22g styrian golding, 1/2 at 10 mins, 1/2 at 30 mins
12g cascade to finish
Using safale S04, which seemed a pretty enthusiastic yeast last time.

So there. I'll keep you posted on what happens to this one.

[MrC]

Hi Richard.

From the look of you recipe, unless the amber malt is pre-hopped, the bitterness will be very low. Assuming that the amber malt is unhopped, I would change the first hop addition to around 28g and boil it for 60 mins (and even that will be at the low end of bitterness). Also the amount of malt seems to be quite high. I brewed a similar recipe last year and I used 1.8kg liquid malt extract and 1kg dry malt extract.

For a quick and easy indication of your bitterness, color, alcohol%, etc, you can plug you recipe into the TastyBrew recipe calculator (http://www.tastybrew.com/calculators/recipe.html). You will need to convert everything to pounds and ounces :(

This is what I followed and it was great: http://www.howtobrew.com/section1/chapter1-1.html

Hope this helps.

Good Luck.

[Richard Walley]

Cheers! That does help! I had a moment of panic, but just checked the fridge, and it turns out that my brain blew a fuse. That packet of hops is nothing like 22g - it's actually 100g. Presumably that's going to make it a bit more bitter...;-). Still planning for 1/2 at 10 mins (by which I mean 10 mins into the boil) and 1/2 at 30, unless anyone's got any better ideas...

I'm interested in the malt thing, though. I assumed that adding more malt would up the alcohol content and make it all taste a bit 'maltier', which is sort of what I'm after - is that about right?

[denimglen]

You are right on the maltier (and possibly alcohol - just depends on how much unfermentables are in the extract) but using all amber might make it a little sweet. I've never used amber extract but I'd say it'd be a pale ale base with crystal 60L or something in it.

http://hbd.org/cgi-bin/recipator/recipator that's quite a good recipe calculator that requires no unit conversion.

Maybe look around on the net and try to find some recipes similar to what you're making and see what their ratio of pale to amber extract is. Even all-grain recipes, then just plug the recipe into BeerSmith (free trial) and convert to an all extract recipe.

Hope that helps.