English Brown Ale

After my recent taste and experience with brewing on a full moon, I simply couldn’t pass up the opportunity to brew again the next time time a full moon came around.  Such a night came around this past Sunday.  My last full moon brew session went late into the night and I didn’t want to be up all night before work, so I decided to take a different route with this brew and we will just have to wait and see how it turns out. 

This recipe is a pretty basic dry malt extract English Brown Ale that is relatively light on the hops.

Recipe:
Amber DME - 5 lbs

Speciality Malts:
English Chocolate Malt - 1 cup
Crystal 120L - 2 cups

Hops:
Fuggle 4.0 α - 1.75 oz (60 minutes)
Fuggle 4.1 α - 0.5 oz (2 minutes)

The process for this was similar, yet different, so it bears repeating here.  I dissolved the DME into 2 gallons of warm water over a 20 minute span.  After the DME was fully dissolved, I placed the specialty malts into a muslin bag and lowered into the brew pot.  Heated the brew to 150 degrees Fahrenheit and held for about 20 minutes.  After 20 minutes, I increased the heat to boiling and removed the malts.  I placed the bittering pellet hops into a nylon bag in the brew pot and placed the grain bag into a strainer over the brew pot to strain out all of that malty flavor.  Thirty-five (35) minutes into the boil I added the whirlfloc tablet and continued the boil for a further 25 minutes, adding the whole leaf fuggle hops in a muslin bag for the last 2 minutes of the boil. 

When the boil was finished, I cooled the wort using a coiled wort chiller, this time I left the bags of hops in the wort during the cooling process.  I cooled the wort down to 150 degrees Fahrenheit and added 2 gallons of cool water into the primary bucket.  Placing the strainer over the primary bucket, I poured the wort into the primary slowly allowing the bags of hops to drop into the strainer but not into the primary.  I pressed the liquid out of the hop bags and filled the primary up to 5 gallons. 

Here is my next big departure from previous procedure: I placed the lid on the primary and sealed the primary with an airlock without pitching the yeast.  Since I did this brew in the afternoon and this was my full moon brew, I decided ahead of time that the most important part for making this a full moon batch was to pitch the yeast after dark.  With the primary locked, I activated the liquid Wyeast packet and waited until dark.  I locked the primary at 3 pm and finally pitched the yeast at 7:20 pm.  The initial γg of my brew was 1.042, just slightly higher than the target γg of 1.038 for a basic mild English brown ale. 

On a completely unrelated note, I realized for the first time during this batch that Wyeast, my favorite liquid yeast to date, is produced in Hood River, Oregon.  So another shout out for my northwestern brethren. 

I checked the brew first thing in the morning, it was insanely early so I will spare you with the time, but fermentation had not yet started.  When I checked again around 9 am, the bubbles had started to build and a couple of hours later they were moving pretty nicely.  If memory serves me correctly, the last brew was already fermenting very actively 9 hours after pitching the yeast but since the γg of that brew was almost 0.02 higher than this batch, that could be a factor playing into how active the fermentation is shortly after pitching.  We’ll continue to track the fermentation progress and hopefully will be ready to rack into the secondary early again with this batch.