Decembeer Ambeer

After class today, I brewed an amber ale.  Well, that's what I was shooting for.  I had several goals I wanted to accomplish with this last batch of the year.

• use my new wort chiller
• use a large amount of flavor and aroma hops
• use a Belgian yeast strain.

I started with 4 gallons of water in my brew pot and these two specialty grains:

• 1 .0 # crystal malt (40L)
• 0.5 # wheat flakes

After the wort came close to a boil, I strained out the grains and added the following at 4:10pm:

• 3.0 # amber DME
• 3.0 # light DME
• 1.0 oz. Columbus Whole Hops (13.0 AA)

In the last 15 minutes at 4:55pm I added:

• 1.0 oz. Columbus Whole Hops
• 1.5 tsp. Irish moss

In the last 10 minutes of the boil, at 5pm I added:

• 1.0 oz. Columbus Whole Hops

In the last 5 minutes of boil time, at 5:05pm I added:

• 1.0 oz. Fuggles Pellet Hops (3.5 AA)

In the final minute of boil, at 5:09pm I added:

• 1.0 oz. Columbus Whole Hops

I stuck the wort chiller into the brew pot and transferred brewpot to the sink.  I started the wort chiller and to my observation it took very little time to cool down the wort.  After it was cool, I removed the wort chiller and began the process of sparging out all those hops.  After removing half the hops, my strainer was full and I had nowhere to put the remaining hops so I trashed them.  After sparging the second half of the hopped wort I noted that the hops had absorbed quite a large amount of the liquid.  It was alarming how much liquid was absorbed, and how much tap water I had to sparge into the fermenter in order to fill it to the proper level.

Next time I may use a hop bag so I can squeeze out the water with sanitized hands.

After getting all the wort into the fermenter I looked at the temp and it was 76 degrees, so I pitched the yeast immediately.  The yeast I used was:

• White Labs WLP570 Belgian Golden Ale Yeast

I cleaned up and the entire process took me approximately 2.5 hours.  I also did some video this time and should have that uploaded to Youtube in the near future.

In a couple days after primary fermentation (estimate 12/11 or 12/12), I'm gonna add:

• 1 oz. of Spalt hop pellets.

A couple days before bottling (estimate 12/25 or 12/26), I'm gonna add:

• 1 oz. of Spalt hop pellets.