With the wind chill temperatures reading about 15 below zero here in New Jersey, thanks to my electric garage heater we were able to brew up a nice Cascadian Dark Ale in comfort yesterday. I targeted a five gallon batch with 24 SRM for color, 100 IBUs for bitterness using 12 ounces of hops and ended up with a 1.076 original gravity wort. The water coming out of the sink's faucet was 48F so cooling the wort down to 68F pitching temperature was a breeze, if only those temperatures were like that here in the summer too.
The recipe is a new one for me 19 lbs. Pale Ale, 1 lb. Chocolate, 1/8 lb. Roasted Barley and 1 lb. of Flaked Wheat. I mashed them for 90 minutes at 149F and boiled the wort for an hour adding hops, yeast nutrient and WhirFloc along the way. The hop schedule was an ounce each of Centennial and Northern Brewer first wort hops, two ounces each of Citra and Cascades at 25 minutes, and the same at 7 minutes, with two additional ounces of Cascades added at knock out. The nutrient and WhirFloc went in at 10 minutes and all the hops were removed at flameout before adding the knockout hops.
- Cascadian-3sml.jpg (64.41 KiB) Viewed 439 times
I oxygenated the wort for a minute and a half then pitched a 350 billion cell starter made from SafAle S-04™ - English Whibread Strain I washed from a batch of beer brewed a few months ago. Having witnessed this yeast in action in a big beer before, I fitted the fermentor with a blow off tube that was already producing bubbles this morning. The temperature controller's set to 66F so the yeast doesn't produce too many esters and to keep the fermentation from going too ballistic. It's a big beer and will need several months of conditioning before it hits its peak flavor, but I know it'll be well worth the wait.
