2/15/2014 NHC Cream Ale

Brewday photosphere...turned out alright

Looking back, I should have just stuck to one beer on this brew day. I had a birthday party to get to that evening which put a time limit on the brewing. Everything had to go perfectly to make the time window I allocated for myself. I've been brewing long enough that I should have known better. I ended up running into some issues and the second brew was rushed and I'll be rebrewing the hefeweizen as a result. I won't even write it up. In short, as a result of rushing around, getting more propane mid-mash, and stupidly adding an additional 3-4 gallons of sparge water that I didn't need, I ended up with a beer that was 10 points below target OG. Still within the style guidelines, but not the beer I want to submit to NHC.

I'll still be submitting my gold medal award winning "Minerva" cream ale to the first round of the National Homebrewing Competition in March. From start to finish, this beer went smoothly. Maybe one of the best brews I've had, process-wise. I made a few adjustments to my original recipe to make it stand out a little more and to brew it within the 4 week timeline that I have.

• I'm going with WLP001 to ferment as opposed to Wyeast 2112 - California Lager. I found that the yeast produced a clean beer, but only dropped the overpowering sulphur flavors after a month or more of lagering. I didn't have that kind of time and I've been thinking about changing the recipe for some time now, so I switched the yeast for this brew.
• Added some complexity to the malt bill: I added a pound of biscuit malt and two pounds of Munich malt. Previously I had been using two pounds of Victory malt, but found it was not strong enough of a flavor to get any bready, toasty notes in the beer.
• Bumped up the flaked corn by a pound, up to 5lbs. I want the beer to remain in the style, so I figured if I added more malt complexity, I ought to also bump up the corny sweetness to balance the flavors.

Water treatment:

5ml lactic acid

5g gypsum

5g calcium chloride

1g baking soda

Calcium: 73

Magnesium: 5

Alkalinity as CaCO3: 79

Sodium: 25

Chloride: 74

Sulfate: 82

RA as CACO3: -27

My second time using the pH meter, I hit 5.2 squarely on the head. Not bad.

Notes: 

Mashed in at 152. It was initially a little high, but it corrected itself within ten minutes.

Collected 13.5 gallons of wort at 1.042 PB OG, then mid-boil I added what was left in the mash tun. Rather than play a guessing game with wort collection, I'm starting to transfer everything from the mash tun. In all, I probably ended up with 14 gallons of wort. I figure that if I consistently do this and then tweak the numbers in Beersmith, I'll be able to consistently collect 12 gallons of beer for fermentation and therefore have ~ 11 gallons for packaging. I had too many beers where I was packaging less than 10 gallons of beer.

I mashed out over 10 minutes then sparged with 9 gallons of treated water at 168 degrees.

Boiled for 60 minutes then chilled to 50 degrees. Pitched 3L starter of WLP001 harvested from NHC Amber Ale 1.1. And set in the fermenter at 60 degrees. Original Gravity stood at 1.050.

After 5 days, the beer was at 1.020. I bumped the temp up to 64 degrees to allow it to clean up and to encourage it to dry out to the target FG. The taste was very corny with some biscuit and toast depth. The hop balance was spot on. I'm looking forward to seeing what lagering will do to it.

On 2/24 I crashed the beer to 38 degrees where it will sit for a week or two before kegging and additional conditioning until it is bottled to ship off to NHC in mid-March.

Update:

3/7/2014: this has been lagering now for about two weeks. The flavor is really nice - crisp, clean, slightly corny - with ample malt to give it complexity. It's very drinkable and it's a great cream ale. I'm slightly worried that the judges will ding it for the extra malt flavor, but it could just as easily set it apart from a more standard iteration of the style.

Recipe below:

Recipe: NHC Minerva Cream Ale
Brewer: Adam Keck
Asst Brewer:
Style: Cream Ale
TYPE: All Grain
Recipe Specifications

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Boil Size: 13.50 gal
Post Boil Volume: 12.50 gal
Batch Size (fermenter): 12.00 gal
Estimated OG: 1.052 SG
Estimated Color: 5.8 SRM
Estimated IBU: 18.3 IBUs
Brewhouse Efficiency: 80.00 %
Est Mash Efficiency: 81.7 %
Boil Time: 60 Minutes

Ingredients:
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Amt Name Type # %/IBU
13 lbs Pale Ale Malt 2-Row (Briess) (3.5 SRM) Grain 1 61.9 %
5 lbs Corn - Yellow, Flaked (Briess) (1.3 SRM) Grain 2 23.8 %
2 lbs Munich I (Weyermann) (7.1 SRM) Grain 3 9.5 %
1 lbs Biscuit Malt (23.0 SRM) Grain 4 4.8 %

1.50 oz Cascade [5.50 %] - Boil 60.0 min Hop 5 16.6 IBUs
0.50 oz Saaz [4.00 %] - Boil 15.0 min Hop 6 1.1 IBUs
0.50 oz Saaz [4.00 %] - Boil 5.0 min Hop 7 0.7 IBUs
1.0 pkg California Ale (White Labs #WLP001) [35. Yeast 8 -

Mash Schedule: Temperature Mash, 1 Step, Medium Body

Total Grain Weight: 21 lbs