Crown Brewery

I’m calling it American Pale Ale at the moment because I haven’t thought of a name and A.P.A is the way of describing the style at the moment.

I’m going to keep updating this post in real time as the brew day goes along.

0830: I mashed in with the same malts I would use for Samuel Berry’s which is 5.1%, but with twist, I added 1kg of Summit hops to the mash.

0900: the hot water is heating up ready to sparge, time to get the first wort hops ready Apollo!!

0930: caustic is flowing from the kettle to the fermenting vessel, first hops are ready.

0950: the spage arm is turning and wort is flowing in to the under-back, I’m geting any hops yet but they were well distributed in the mash. hopfully I’ll get some hoppy aromas when the middle worts are coming through.

0955: the first wort hops are in 500g of Apollo.

1017 I’m just starting to get a little bit of hops coming through now, its more obvious when the wort is cold.

1030: we have 2 barrels of wort in the kettle and the steam is on.

1053: we have 3 barrels of wort in the kettle and another 18 gallons of water to sparge

1100 sparge is off, just another 3/4 of a barrel (27 gallon) to collect from the mash.

1125: we now have 4.3 barrels of wort in the kettle and its just showing signs of a rolling boil.

1130: full rolling boil time for more hops!

1135: time to dig the mash and start the CIP cleaning in the fermenting vessel.

1143: the mash smells amazing! but does that mean most of the aromas didn’t make it to the kettle?

1200: mash tun is cleaned out.

1210: time for lunch.

1220:

1225: lunch is gone time to rince the fermenting vessel.

1235: time to weigh out the late hops and start adding them to the boil.

1240: 1kg of cenntenial has just been added, time to weigh  out the Apollo.

1245:1kg of Apollo has been added.

1250: boil completed, the wort will sit for 15 minutes.

1305: recirculate the wort in the kettle and flush the wort pipe to fermenting vessel.

1320: wort flows to the fermenting vessel through the heat exchanger which cools it down to 19 degrees centigrade, the gravity is 1058.5, it smells amazing I’m really happy with this brew!

1350: the kettle is empty apart from the hops, but they aren’t quite spent yet because its hop sparge time.

1400: we have 3.6 barrels of wort in the fermenting vessel and we need 4.25 brls so I am doing a hop sparge, this is when I add some more not water to the spent hops in the kettle and recirculate it. The hop sparge is going to extract more fementables,  bitterness and hop flavour from the spent hops.

1410: start pumping and cooling the hop sparge liquid.

1430: we have 4.25 barrels of wort at a gravity of 1052 this should ferment to about 1009 be about 5.3% abv.

1435: US-05 dried yeast is added to the fermenter, the lid is on and I’ll check it tomorrow.

As Porky Pig would say “thats all folks”. Thanks for the comments through the day, its been like having you all in for a brew day.

This brew is going to get some more hops it so stay tuned and I’ll blog the details later in the week.

One last thing before click the post button for the the last time, this beer needs a name?

I just tried the beer, I’ll talk about that in a minute. First I want to talk a bit about the why and who.

I brewed this beer as a home brew size test brew last year, I didn’t think it had fermented very well gravity readings were around 1035 ish from what I thought was a 1115 original gravity (OG), it tasted a bit sweet. So I left it in the bucket on a shelf in my fermenting room for about six months (I can be lazy sometimes), then one  day I decided to try it. It didn’t seem to have been affected much by the prolonged stay, in a not very well sealed brew bucket, in a warm fermenting room through the summer so decided to rack it in to a newly acquired Cornelius keg. I let the beer sit with 15psi CO2 for a few weeks, WOOW it had become a monster! The carbonation seemed to balance the sweetness, hops were there but very much in the back ground.

I kept trying the beer and giving out samples. I liked it best with a piece of mature cheddar and that’s how it was used for a while until one day Pete Brown came to stay, he really liked it, I mean REALLY liked it. Pete wrote on his round up of 2009 blog, that he would like me to brew it and bottle it in 750ml corked bottles. I’m not going to do corked bottles but I am doing 750ml ones with swing tops.

The brew day took some planning but we got there in the end Stefano (from Thornbridge) has been a good friend of mine since he first came over from Italy in 2005. Stef was really keen to see what happened on the brew day as he had never seen this technique for creating a strong wort. Pete also wanted to be here on the brew day so this made date setting even more difficult, but we got ther in the end and the sixteen hour brew day went off without a hitch.

The brew went of like a rocket and a gravity reading yesterday confirmed that the yeast had given up after six days and had fermented about 11.5% abv’s worth the wort, 75% of the sugars were fermented in to alcohol.

HPA28° has been chilling in the fermenting vessel since yesterday and just had a taste, WOOOW! I was really surprised by how much it tasted like the test brew (in a good way), not as hoppy as thought it was going to be, actually really balanced, so Chunk I might end up dry hopping the tank after all.

I’ll be transferring to the spare tank tomorrow because I want to get the beer off the knacked yeast cells. When the yeast has worked this hard the cells can rupture and start decaying in the beer and I don’t want all those, well, shitty farm yard/meaty smells in my beer.

Please ask questions, there will be stuff you don’t understand and stuff I haven’t explained well enough, just click the comment thing at the bottom.

Cheers

The plan was to make a strong, all malt wort (the sweet liquid that ferments in to beer), so no sugar was added. The method involves mashing twice and boiling twice, the second boil would be a small beer, which would ensure there wasn’t to much wasted extract. The first mash produced two lots of wort, the first 3.5 barrels (a barrel is 36 gallon) of wort had a gravity reading of 1063 which if fermented as it was would have produced a strong beer of between 6.5 and 7% abv. The second 3.5 barrels of wort had a gravity of 1035, we saved this to sparge the second mash.

Once we had collected all the wort from the first mash it was time to get ready for the second mash. This involved heating the first wort to mashing temperature and mashing another 175kg in to the mash tun.
Once the second mash had stood for one hour we were ready to start collecting the strong wort this ran in to the underback (a small holding tank that feeds the main wort pump) the smell was amazing and it tasted like honey.

The first gravity reading was 1120 and peaked at around 1127. At this point we started sparging, this normally involves spraying the top of the mash with hot water which washes all the sugary sweet fermentables from the grain. But today the second mash was sparged with the second wort from the first mash, this maximized the strength. Then after we had collected 3.75 barrels of strong wort we began sparging with hot water and collecting the second wort from the second mash. This became the the small beer which we later boiled with 1kg of Sonnet (3.3% alpha acid) hops with an extra 2kg added at the end of the boil.

But before that we boiled the strong wort with 2kg of Summit hops (17.1% alpha acid) this would give us a theoretical bitterness of 170 IBU’s. We boiled for one hour then added 1kg of Centennial hops then five minutes later added 2kg of Cascade and boil for a further five minutes before turning the heat off and allowing the hops to stew. This wort was then cooled and pumped to the fermenting vessel, we had just under three barrels of wort with a gravity of 1117. We then added half a barrel of hot water to the hops which were left in the brew kettle and let it stew again soaking all the remaining sweetness, bitterness and flavor from the hops we then pumped this last bit of wort in to the fermenting vessel giving us a final gravity reading of 1110.

It was a very long day but well worth it and I can’t wait to taste the finished beer. But I’ve got to wait a while first because this HPA28° will be sitting in a tank in the cellar for four months, when it will be bottled in 750ml swing tops. There should be around 600 bottles available from October onwards. The bottles will be available from Beer Ritz, The Hillsborough Hotel and MyBreweryTap.com so far.

I’m thinking about having a special release day, what do you think?

I’ve been delivering today and I took a couple of special beers to North Bar in Leeds. I delivered a cask of India Pale Ale 7.2%, you can watch Zak’s vblog about it  here and the last cask of Django Reinhardt 6.3% which I brewed with Zak him self you can watch his vblog about that here. I also took them a cask of Ring of Fire 2009 7.7% which I brewed with chillies from chilliupnorth and beer reviews nutter Andy.

I brewed my Wheat Beer 5.9% again the other week and yesterday I bottled some of it, hopefully it will get on mybrewerytap in a week or so in very limited numbers of course, I only did 110 bottles so only 9 cases.

I also bottled some Stannington Stout 5% the other week and they will go on mybrewerytap soon, look out for tweets from @crownbrewery or @mybrewerytap.

Don’t forget Wheat Stout and Unpro IPA are already available from mybrewerytap.com.