Better Red Than Dead

It seems as if two weeks have passed and it is therefore time for a new batch of beer. My system works approximately as follows: Brew a batch of beer. Allow to ferment in the Mr. Beer fermenting plasticask for 10 - 14 days. Bottle with priming sugar to promote secondary fermentation and carbonation. (A day or two later, brew a new batch of beer and place that one on this cycle.) After 10-14 more days, pop the bottled beer in the fridge. After a day or two, begin to enjoy. What this means is every two weeks I have a batch of beer ready to drink and every two weeks I make a new batch. Because I always have a new beer style becoming ready to drink, this keeps things interesting while adding spice to my non-existent schedule.

To refresh the reader's memory, my first two batches (made from malt extract) were Golden Lager and Blonde Ale. Batch three, which just became drinkable, was the Porter. Batch four, ready to be consumed in less than two weeks, was the ESB. In this fortnight, I wanted to try to replicate one of my favorite beers, Founder's Red's Rye PA. Sorta. According to Beer Advocate, the Red's Rye is made with four varieties of Belgian caramel malts and 100% Amarillo hops. I deviated somewhat from this, due to availability of ingredients and stuff I already bought. I don't want to accumulate 28 different kinds of malted barley in my already cramped kitchen. Here's the grain composition of my beer:



Bottom to top:

• 2 lb 2-row pale malt
• 1 lb rye malt
• 10 oz Belgian CaraMunich
• 2 oz flaked barley
• 1 oz chocolate malt (not pictured)

To avoid repetitititivenes, I'll spare the details of the brewing process. Mash-in at 130 F. Protein rest for 25 minutes at 125 F. Saccharify at 155 F for 90 minutes. Lauter and Sparge to extract wort. Boil wort with hops. One little twist was that, according to this beer color calculator, my beer wasn't going to have the desired rich, red color with the ingredients I'd originally intended to use. I thought I had more of the CaraMunich than I actually did, so I needed to compensate with the addition of 1 oz chocolate malt (thus why it isn't pictured). It will also provide some complexity to the final product. Here's what the wort looks like:



One of my goals with this beer, in contrast with the Porter, was to end up with a really hoppy beer. I used two full ounces of hops for my two gallon batch. I had one ounce of Amarillo hops pellets and one ounce of Cascades hops plugs. The plugs have a much fresher flavor and contribute more oomph to the beer than pellets tend to. The wort boil lasted about one hour. At the beginning of the hour, I added 1/3 of Amarillo hops. I did so again after 30 minutes and after 55. After the full hour, I added one of the 1/2 oz Cascades hops plugs. Then I removed the wort from the stove and added bags of ice to rapidly chill. Once at room temperature, I added the final Cascades plug. This process is called cold/dry hopping. Typically this is done in the fermenting vessel, but I didn't want to clog up the works in my dainty little fermenter. I left the hops to flavor for two full days in the refrigerator. Hops contain Alpha Acids which promote bittering and preservation but also many delicate aromatic compounds which are destroyed in heat. The cold hopping is to preserve these compounds. As a side note, I have a plastic mesh bag, like a giant tea infuser, that can hold the hops during the boil. It makes straining out the hops later very easy, as I can just wring out the bag. Here's the hops after being wrung out and dumped on a plate. You can see some whole hop cones, loose leaves, and clumps of muck. The clumps of muck are the ground pellets after soaking up the wort. They look like moss. They all smell wonderful, though.



This beer doesn't look all that different from my ESB, though it has a slightly lower gravity and therefore the potential alcohol content is lower. Original gravity is 1.054 so the alcohol could reasonably reach about 6%.



Then there's the matter of the yeast. The day before I planned to make beer, I made a yeast starter using one of my cultures, dehydrated malt extract, and water. After a few hours, I gave it some white sugar after which it became quite active. It was midway through the process that I decided to cold hop (and delay fermenting by 48 hours), so I stashed the starter in the fridge. As you can see, after three days, the yeast (sludge at the bottom) have multiplied considerably. This should make for a wonderful brew.



Prost!