Brew Day!

I know Anna and I have fallen down on keeping the blog updated. Yet, there's still brewing! Perhaps we'll get on top of updating the blog soon...

But for now, I'm going to take notes on my brews for the day.

The first beer is based on Northern Brewer's AK47 Pale Mild recipe. I decided that 5 gallon batches were not always necessary, so I got a 3 gallon Better Bottle that I'm going to use to ferment smaller batches...

The stats:

Boil size - 3.75 gallons, batch size 3 gallons.
Estimated O.G. 1.043, F.G. 1.011
Calories: 140, 29 IBU, 4.06 ABV.
Ingredients:
2 LBS Breiss Pilsen Light DME
.5 LBS Corn Sugar
1 oz Fawcett Pale Chocolate Grain
.5 LBS Simpsons Caramalt
1 OZ Kent Golding (.75 OZ 60 mmin, .25 OZ 15 mins) 5.8 AA, 3.2 BA
Wyeast Neobritania Yeast
1 Whirfloc tablet

The benefit of a 3 gallon batch is that it lets me boil the entire batch, and will eventually let me do full grain batches. I'm purifying the water in the Brita before adding it to the pot... about 3 gallons worth.

I don't have a scale, so instead of weighing the grain malts I eyeballed it... I have 1 lb packs of each, and put about half of the Simpsons and 1/2 cup of the Fawcett in.
I'm under-adding the water - the new carboy has a different spout, so I can't use a blowoff tube. The end result may be less than 3 gallons, so I'm withholding some of the hops and corn sugar. I put in 2/3 Cups of corn sugar, which comes to (around) .4 lbs.

Actual O.G. 1.043/1.044 - pretty close!

The next one is Northern Brewer's Rye Stout

I wanted to do something with Rye - we'll see how this goes.

.5 lbs Chocolate Rye
.5 lbs England Black Malt
.5 lbs English Dark Crystal
(added) .5 lbs Fawcett Pale Chocolate
6.3 lbs Northern Brewer Dark Rye Extract
1 oz Warrior (60 min)
Wyeast 1450 Denny's Favorite 50

Update in a bit.