Sunday Funday

This past Sunday, February 17 was the day we got off of our asses to finally do some work. The work involved:
A) modification of P-Town Brown Ale
B) modification of the Scuzzy Buzzy IPA
C) bottling of ABR. ID. Double Red Ale (pronounced abbreviated identification).
I don't know if Double Red Ale is a true style, but that's what we are going with in order to adequately describe it.

A powerhouse of smooth funk

Our music choice for the day is a masterpiece by the incredible Booker T. & the M.G.'s, McLemore Avenue. Tis a tribute to, or may I say re-envisioning of, The Beatles' Abbey Road. These guys are good. Really good. And they play it oh-so-nice. There was other music involved, like Chick Corea's 1978 oddity The Mad Hatter, which is an interesting and funk-laden album, but Booker T. is the main event here. On to the beer.

Straight Bitter, yo

As I said previously, we had a few things to work on. The simplest task was modification of the Scuzzy Buzzy IPA, which was a victim of the infamous small-bag incident (see post 30 January 2013). Due to extremely low hop utilization, we had to add some bitterness to this guy.  Fortunately we were finally able to acquire some reasonably priced Isomerized hop extract. This stuff is literally concentrated bitterness. Ask my buddy Calvin. I let him sample a fraction of a drop. That shit is bitter. It consists mainly of isomerized alpha acids and is typically used for post-fermentation bittering. That is exactly how we used it here. To determine how much to add, we used Hop Union's Calculator and scaled-down a bit to meet our needs. To increase the bitterness about 40 IBU's, we added slightly less than 3.0mL using a graduated pipette. Calculations called for 2.9mL. Our equipment isn't that precise, but I gave it a shot. If I made an honest list of things at which I excel, pipetting would likely be top 3. I do a lot of pipetting. The extract was added directly to the carboy. We will give it a try in a few days. I think dry hopping would have been a good choice here too. Maybe I'll do that.

I should note that 20 IBU's were added to the Nice tRye PA via 1.5mL extract after the hop tea addition failed to meet suitability criteria (it didn't taste good). The addition of the extract really helped to balance the beer and bring out some wonderful flavors. If a situation similar to that caused by the bad bags occurs in the future, we now have a very reasonable solution - add extract to adjust bitterness and dry hop to add aroma. We didn't dry hop this, but it is certainly a viable option.

The next item in need of modification was our most recent batch of P-Town Brown Ale. The brew was much lighter in color than expected - somewhere around 6°SRM as opposed to the theoretical 27°SRM. This batch was the first in which we steeped the specialty grains instead of including them in the mash, so an inefficient steep is likely where things went wrong.  Luckily this was an easy fix.

We started by determining the amount of grain we needed to steep to add the missing 21°SRM. According to Morey's Regression,

°SRM = 1.49(MCU)^0.69   

where 

MCU = (color °L grain)(Lbs grain) / Batch Volume

Before (Left) and After (Right)

In the case of chocolate malt, °L=350, which means 1Lbs grain contributes approximately 28°SRM to 5gal beer.  As we wanted to add 21°SRM, we used 0.75Lbs chocolate malt. The grains were steeped 30min at about 160°F in 0.5gal H2O.  The result was 1.5qts of lovely dark brown tea.  We sparged with 0.5qts 170°F H2O in order to reach 0.5gal, as we had approximately 4.5gal in the carboy. The result was a brown ale worthy of being called brown.

As a slight bonus, the process also added a bit of sugar to the brew, which had fermented down to a gravity of 1.006. Much too low for this beer.  We considered adding malt extract to bring the gravity up to 1.012, but decided the approximately 2 points added via the tea would suffice. Now this 3rd generation brown ale is in secondary, waiting to be bottled.

Lazy Asshole, Check

The last bit of work we had to take care of was the bottling of our ABR. ID. Double Red Ale, which was brewed November 24, 2012. Three months of fermentation is good - the brew turned out nicely in an interesting way. A product of carefully (read- randomly) chosen spare ingredients, ABR. ID. Ale is dark red, slightly sweet with balanced bitterness, and exhibits some unexpected fruity flavors which complement the unnoticeable 7.9% ABV. We ended up with 45 bottles of the stuff. It will be ready for consumption around March 10.  I'm looking forward to it.