Brew 4 : An American Brown

Well we finally got to brew day 4, not the normal quick turnaround i’d like (approximately 10 days between bottling and getting the next brew on) but fun all the same. For the first time, I had another brewer help! My friend Michael came over and made this one a lot less work than just myself trying to do everything at once, usually to my detriment like dropping sieves in the fermenter and the like.

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I decided this time to only brew with what I had in the house. I’ve quite a lot of malt, hops and grain so wanted to try and use some up. I had a whole kilo and a half of dark malt, so it was odds on it was going to be some kind of stout, porter or brown ale. After a quick assessment of the hops I had the choice was pretty obvious. A lot of Northern Brewer and a lot of EK Goldings. Its said to be Brown Ale!

The Northern Brewer we used to bitter, with the EK Goldings providing the flavour. We used the full kilo and a half of dark malt (half at the start of the boil and the rest at flame out). Pretty simple brew with no grain used at all (although I only ever steep). Wanted this one to be a quick quality brew and something I could easy reproduce and play with recipe wise if need be.

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I learnt a trick today brewing with Michael. Throw my enormous cocktail ice cubes in the stock pot at the end of the brew to cool down the wort to pitching temperature, took a good 10 minutes off my normal cooling routine in the end.

And actually remember to take a hydrometer reading which interesting was exactly what the recipe told us it would be 1.060. Now is the nervous part of course the wait for the airlock to start bubbling as of 6 hours there is currently no action. Which isn’t unusual in the past I’d expect something to happen the next day, but there have been cases where the airlock has been bubbling away.

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Quite looking forward to trying this one, I haven’t brewed an sort of dark ale for a long time and I’ve brewed this in the perfect season for it with winter coming. Hopefully it will keep me warm throughout.

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