Maxing It Out

I have always brewed 6 gallon batches. I’ve wanted to do more but my need to control my fermentation has kept me limited. But with some new temperature control toys I am now able to do larger batch sizes. So with this I set out to do my biggest batch ever.

I doubled my Pale Ale Recipe and a couple of red flags came up when I started to crunch the numbers. My mash tun is a 10 gallon igloo water cooler and I was concerned about the amount of grain I could fit in it. After a little consultation with the BNArmy I found a great website that has a calculator for just this function. http://www.rackers.org/calcs.shtml

I had to adjust my water to grain ratio a bit but I was able to max out my tun with 26 lbs. of grain. It was very very full!

One of the problems with brewing a batch this large is the increased time needed to bring it to boil. This seemed to take forever and the weather was not helping much either. The morning had started off calm and nice but during my sparge the black clouds rolled in and the wind picked up too. My Blichmann burners are usually pretty good in a light breeze but it was downright blustery and they were trying to flame out, so I don’t think I was getting maximum BTU’s. If anything is going to make this beer special it’s going to be the Hail additions.

One thing I wanted to try with a batch this big is to split up the wort into two different beers. One fermenter will be my normal dry hop additions of Citra and Amarillo the other will have Nelson Sauvin.

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

 

Matt’s Pale Ale

Grain

22 lbs 12.2 oz Pale Malt
1 lbs 6.6 oz Munich Malt
1 lbs 6.6 oz Victory Malt
1 lbs 0.1 oz Wheat Malt

Hops Used

1.28 oz Columbus (Tomahawk) [14.00 %] – Boil 60.0 min Hop 5 30.3 IBUs
0.97 oz Amarillo Gold [8.50 %] – Boil 10.0 min Hop 7 2.8 IBUs
0.97 oz Cascade [5.50 %] – Boil 10.0 min Hop 8 1.8 IBUs
1.00 oz Amarillo Gold [8.50 %] – Aroma Steep 20.0 min Hop 9 0.0 IBUs
1.00 oz Cascade [5.50 %] – Aroma Steep 20.0 min Hop 10 0.0 IBUs
2.00 oz Amarillo Gold [8.50 %] – Dry Hop 3.0 Days Hop 12 0.0 IBUs
2.00 oz Citra [12.00 %] – Dry Hop 3.0 Days Hop 13 0.0 IBUs

Yeast WLP001 or Wyeast1056

Mash at 150 ferment at 67

IPA Comp Update

While I’m still waiting for my score sheets. I can say that Hobbit Sauce IPA got Second Place in the English IPA category and advanced to the best of show round. I’m pretty sure I can make this good beer even better by increasing the hop aroma.

Hobbit Sauce takes Second Place. It’s E6 on the bracket.