American Brown Ale

I picked up a copy of Gordon Strong's Modern Homebrew Recipes at GABF in September. Today I'm brewing a recipe from that book, American Brown Ale. I also have some company today; Chris Detrick from the Salt Lake Tribune joined me today for a video piece on Homebrewing in Utah. Chris is a very accomplished homebrewer himself so it was a lot of fun to have him on hand. I'll add a link to the video once it's available.

Updated: Here's a link to the piece. Chris did an awesome job with the editing. He took all my rambling and managed to put it together so that it made sense. It's funny because I'd planned on talking about all these different things, but when the camera was on, my mind went blank. It was much harder than I imagined to form coherent thoughts.   

American Brown Ales are a style I really enjoy. I don't brew them as often as I should, but they're a great style to have on hand. Moose Drool is one of my favorite commercial examples. The combination of caramel, toffee, and chocolate characters blended with fairly assertive hop character is something I really enjoy. Here's the recipe as I made it today.

10.0# Rahr 2-row

2.0# Avangard Munich I

1.0# Briess Crystal 60

0.5# Briess Crystal 40

0.5# Crisp Chocolate Malt (Vorlauf)

2.0 oz Weyermann Carafa II (Vorlauf)

28g Saaz (FWH)

14g Galaxy (15 min)

28g Sterling (5 min)

Wyeast 1272 American Ale II
0.5t Wyeast Nutrient
0.5 Whirlfloc

Mash at 151F for 60 min, 90 minute boil, ferment at 66F.

Water treatment - Per the recipe in the book, I'm using RO water and adding 3.4g (1t) CaCl to the mash. I'm still learning about water chemistry, but this just seems too simple...regardless, I'm going with it.

Brewing Notes
No issues with this beer. Dark grains were added once we started running off to the boil kettle; at first I was a little worried because it wasn't picking up much color, but that changed after a few minutes. With the cooler temps this time of year, we were able to chill down to pitching temps fairly quickly.

Update 11/18/2015

I had to hook up a blow off tube this morning. This yeast produced a very dense mousse-like krausen that slowly crept higher and higher. It finally pushed up through the airlock sometime late last night or early this morning.

Update 12/5/2015
I decided to dry hop with the remaining 14g of Galaxy. This was added today.

Update 12/14/2015
This went back into the ferm chamber yesterday for cold crashing. I'm hoping to keg it later this week.

Update 12/20/2015

I kegged this beer today. The aroma coming off this beer was fantastic, hoppy with some really nice malty complexity. As with most of my kegged beers, I primed it and will let it naturally carb over the next couple weeks.