Recipe Reboots/Alt Country

I love homebrewing with a passion. I love experimenting with new ingredients, and I like hectically jockeying a few batches around at once, especially in the summer when I have the time to do so. The consequence of this, however, is that I don’t always keep the best records of my ingredients and processes. I’ve found myself documenting original gravity readings written on Post-it notes, scrawling a schedule of hop additions sketched on our refrigerator whiteboard, and hunting for old Brew and Grow receipts to figure out which yeast strain or specialty grains I used. Enough!

When I started doing this a few years back, I kept meticulous records. I even received a specially formatted notebook for keeping track of homebrew recipes from my sister-in-law and her fiancé as a Christmas gift. I filled it out in detail for a while, but—alas!—I eventually got too comfortable and went back to my Post-its and whiteboard shenanigans. I was like the time when Mr. T was at the mall and Homer Simpson kept telling himself, “I’ll go a little later, I’ll go a little later.” Folks, not keeping track of your homebrew records will hurt the quality of your future beer endeavors. The next time you want to brew that Columbus and Citra White IPA that your friends and co-workers drooled over and you can’t figure out how to replicate it, you’ll know that Mr. T has left the mall.

This has led me to the realization that I can’t ever let this kind of lapse in record keeping happen again, especially since I design my own recipes and rarely brew from kits. Over the next few weeks I’m going to post summaries of all of my past brews, or at least the most successful ones that I plan on doing again. I also intend to update recipes posted in the past if I have made any adjustments or improvements to them.

I’ll start with my most recent brew, Alt Country. It’s my take on an Altbier, yet it incorporates some American hops and UK malt into the mix. It’s ready to bottle on August 21^st. Cheers!

Alt Country

Style: Altbier

Water:

2 ½ gallons in brew kettle, heated to 155 F to steep specialty grains.

1 gallon in separate pot, heated to 155 F for sparging specialty grains.

Grains:

1 lb. 55 L UK Crystal Malt

Extract:

7 lbs. extra light DME

Hops:

1 oz. Northern Brewer pellets (bittering @ 60 min.)

1 oz. Cascade pellets (flavor @ 30 min.)

1 oz. Cascade pellets (flavor @ 15 min.)

1 oz. Willamette pellets (aroma @ 5 min.)

Yeast:

Wyeast 1007 German Ale

Other Ingredients:

1 Whirlfloc tab or 1 tsp. or Irish moss (added 15 minutes before flameout).

Water to add to the wort to achieve 5 ½ gallons of total volume in the primary fermenter.

¾ cup of corn sugar or 1 ¼ cups of ex light DME boiled in 2 cups of water for five minutes to prime beer before bottling.

Notes:

The original gravity should be around 1.062 and the final gravity should be around 1.014, which should put the beer at about 6.3% ABV. However, these readings obviously depend on how much water you add to the fermenter when diluting the wort before pitching the yeast. I used to start with about 5 gallons, but I’ve adjusted that to around 5 ½ because of all the volume I lose in trub and yeast sediment when transferring to the secondary and bottling bucket. I don’t strain my wort obsessively like I used to when transferring from the brew kettle to the primary carboy. I don’t see the point because the Whirlfloc helps a lot of the gunk settle out, and I do a secondary fermentation anyway. Consequently, I have a lot of trub at the bottom of my primary, so I think that extra half gallon helps me compensate for the extra volume of solids.

Also concerning water, I would recommend using distilled H20 (I’m saying this from the perspective of someone with hard tap water; if you have an awesome source at your disposal, disregard). I know my tap water sucks because the hardness is through the roof whenever I test the levels in my fish tank. I’ve had much better results when switching to distilled water. Also, it also has the benefit of being more sterile than what might come out of your faucet in terms of beer spoilers, so that’s another bonus. This advice applies only to extract brewing; all grain brewers shouldn’t use distilled water because it lacks some desirable minerals for yeast health. Malt extract has the minerals from the water table where it was produced, so it’s not an issue.

I’ll post some tasting notes on this one after it’s bottled and carbed. Happy beer adventures in the meantime!