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It’s the break between Christmas and New Year in Sydney and despite average highs reaching the high twenties or even early thirties we had a cool day. Having withdrawals from brewing I had to take a chance despite the forecast for the next few days soaring back into the high twenties.

This beer partly came about because I was running low on ingredients and partly inspired by the malt forward taste of Marston’s IPA. I found Marston’s quite mild hop wise, which is good, because I think I’m sick of drowning my beers in hops.

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White Rabbit Dark Ale

It’s close to my Black IPA but lighter in colour, hops and alcohol. So should be easy to do and taste just as good.

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I have to start this recipe by firstly admitting that I have never tasted a cream ale – so I will have no idea whether I got it right or not. They’re a fairly rare beer in terms of commercial varieties and none of the Australian boutique bottle shops seem to stock any. Not even slowbeer.com.au.

I also decided to make it because I was doing some late night home brew shopping online and came across flaked maize. Wondering why anyone would use such an ingredient in home brew I felt I must take up the challenge of trying it. Little did I realise there are only two real styles that ask for it (unless you count American piss lager). Cream ale and a few ESB recipes, and I get the feeling the ESB recipes only ask for it because a lot of them ask for everything, including the kitchen sink.

You can read all about the style guidelines on the BJCP’s site but essentially cream ale is an ale version of an american lager. Low on malt and hops, a large percentage of the sugars come from corn, in the form of flaked maize or from corn based sugar products such as dextrose.

It should be fermented at low temperatures and lagered. Unfortunately it’s both October in Sydney with an average temperature in the early twenties and I have no fridge to lager in so I’m hoping it still turns out ok.

Ingredients

• 1.5 kilograms pale liquid malt extract (LME)
• 500 grams dry malt extract (DME)
• 300 grams dextrose
• 1/2 kilo marris otter malt
• 400g flaked maize (corn)
• 100 grams carapils
• 40 grams light crystal malt
• Hallertau and Saaz hops
• Safale US05 dry yeast

Steep grains in 3 litres at 70c for 60 mins and sparge with 4 litres of water at 70c.

Bring to boil and stir in 500 grams of dry malt extract to help isomerise the hops.

40 grams hallertau AA 5.9% 60 mins

25 grams saaz 15 mins (AA 3.5%)

Teaspoon of Irish moss at 15 mins

15 grams saaz 1 min

10 grams hallertau 1 min

Some time during the boil the dextrose can be added. Where is not important. As soon as the flame goes out add the liquid malt extract tin. One issue with adding the liquid malt extract so late was that with the aggressive cooling of the wort employed there was a thick layer of extract left on the bottom of the kettle. After the majority of the wort was poured into the fermenter there was a need to pour some hot water into the bottom of the kettle to mix up the remaining extract to be poured out. Hopefully no contamination made it in.

Original gravity was 1048 and the sample and at 73 – 77% efficiency the final gravity should turn out around 1012 but given the high ratio of straight up sugars and corn products which I’m hoping for closer to 1006 which will be the lowest final gravity of any of my brews so far.

Fermentation

Luckily for this brew Sydney decided to have a cool Spring. Most of the fermentation was done in temperatures below 22 degrees celsius which seems to be important to the cream ale style. One week in the primary and a healthy yeast cake had developed. The beer was transferred into the secondary and so far has been in there for a week.

Bottling

After an unintentionally long eight week conditioning in the secondary (who knew having a baby was so hard) the remaining 17 litres were bottled with 150 grams of dextrose. Unfortunately by then the weather had warmed up so the small fermentation that happens to carbonate the beer won’t be under the most favourable conditions but I don’t expect an impact on flavour.

Tasting

A week after being bottled the beer is not highly carbonated yet and does have some residual sweetness but I’m quite happy. The first question you may have while reading off the ingredients list is: Does it taste of corn? The answer is, no.

It’s a light beer that still tastes distinctly like an ale but much less heavy, fruity and sweet than most ales. It’s quite bitter and as expected from the hop schedule it has a very distinct saaz taste. There is a tiny hint of oxidisation, no doubt from the eight weeks in the secondary. Colour and clarity are still the same as the picture of the sample above. Lemon with a hint of gold and fairly cloudy. It should make a nice sessional drop when it’s had a little time to bottle mature.

The second India Black Ale I made was an outstanding success both for myself and importantly a hit with others. So much so 25 bottles of it went within a couple of weeks. So I decided to make it again but try a few of my new tricks – partial mashing, gypsum for intense hop flavour and late extract addition. Of course I thought I’d try hop it up a bit more which, because of the late extract additions and gypsum, isn’t actually necessary. The hop flavour is intensified through these two process changes. As a result there’ll be about the same weight of hops but the total alpha acids in the hop bill will surpass the last IBA.

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This one started off as a Little Creatures Bright Ale (LCBA) clone then I realised that the Saaz B hops in LCBA are nothing like Saaz hops which were the only Saazl I had so I decided to explore a little. This batch will be my first real mini-mash with over a kilo worth of grains being used, plus I’ll use late extract addition again in an attempt to make a very pale ale. It follows no known style but maybe this could be the start of a new one.

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With this recipe I was trying to emulate your typical English pub bitter. Amber in colour, quite bitter and caramel tasting but without any burnt notes. They always seem to have a wonderful fruity bouquet so dry hopping will be employed once again.

There are two new tricks I used with this one though. The first is that I’m using Gypsum (calcium sulfate) in an attempt to Burtonise the brewing water. I know it’s all very un-scientific but I’m hoping the addition at least helps bring out the flavours a little better than plain old Sydney water. The second trick I’m trying is late extract addition. Normally when you add most of your base malt through extract the DME or LME will get scorched and caramelise giving a nice but not always desirable smokey toffee flavour. In this recipe I added only half the LME to the boil and added the rest of the sugars at the end of the boil. It had the desired effect of lightening the beer, maybe too light as this wort was almost yellow.

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I first attempted an India Black Ale long before I knew other home brewers had made an actual style out of it. My India Black Ale (IBA) or dark IPA was a failure, well at least in that it turned out to be a beautiful amber colour. It tasted fantastic though. Back then I was naive and believed I could affect the colour of a kit beer by adding some raw sugar to the mix. Since then I’ve started extract and mini-mash brewing which has allowed me to experiment with the colours different grains can give beers – like my Red Ale, which was effectively a British bitter with some dark grains thrown in. Very tasty and very close to red. (more…)

Today I decided to try out an old portable butane gas stove that we used to use for camping as a way of regulating the heat of my min-mash/grain steep.  Suffice to say it only really has two settings – on or off so it didn’t work so well for that purpose.

So then I wondered whether there was any chance it could keep a nine litre wort boiling. To my surprise it worked. Taking only about ten minutes to bring the whole thing to a nice healthy rolling boil, which was much healthier than the light simmer the electric stove top managed to produce. Normally bringing a wort that size to the boil would have taken almost an hour and be accompanied by lots of swearing and pacing around looking bored.

I’m in love with this setup as it has saved me well over an hour. The best bit about it is now that spring has sprung I can look forward to brewing outside in the sun on a weekend.

Inspired partly  by the estery flavours and sweetness I found in a glass of Franziskaner‘s weissbeer and partly spurred on by the success of my Apple Ale I decided to brew my first wheat beer and my second fruit beer. This is the recipe and my experience in producing a cherry wheat beer.

Forethought

One thing I have noticed in my short but illustrious homebrewing career is that many of the beers I have produced lack the same sort of body as some commercial brews. It appears there are some special malts that claim to increase body and head feel. Quite by chance I was talking to my local homebrew shop owner about what to put in wheat beer and he recommended carapils. Just one of those grains. Carapils adds little in terms of colour, flavour and sugar content but it is claimed that it increases head retention and gives a fuller body in small amounts. So apart from further experimentation with fruit I will also be carefully monitoring how the carapils affects the body of this beer. (more…)

This brew needs to have a flavour that will be bitter but sweet and slightly malty, reminiscent of a granny smith. Nose will have some Saaz hops but
these need to give way to the apple smell so flavour and aroma hops will be limited.

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