Maple Brown Ale

So I had planned on doing 2 brown ales with my White Labs WLP037 Yorkshire Square Ale yeast: a Nut Brown Ale similar to Samuel Smith's Nut Brown Ale, and a Maple Brown Ale. Well, I decided to make a nut brown ale with maple syrup - and it was more mapley than planned....

I did the math wrong and ended up with 2L more wort than could fit in my kettle. As such, I decided to dump some of it and let the very full kettle boil for 90 min or more until it got down to 5.5 gallons. Well, my GF and I were planning to go out to dinner (for my birthday) so I just did a 60 min boil and ended up with 6 gal or so of 1.048 wort - and I wanted a little more kick, so I added another 8 oz or so of maple syrup (I'm going to prime the keg with even more!). I ended up with a 1.052 wort of nice brown beer.

The Recipe:

8 lb Maris Otter
9 oz Special Roast
8 oz Carastan Malt
5 oz Chocolate Malt (UK)
4 oz Crystal 135L (UK)
14 fl oz Maple Syrup (Grade B)

.5 oz Mt. Hood (5.1 AA) FWH
1 oz Mt. Hood (5.1 AA) 60 min

Whirlfloc

1.052, 20 IBU, ~5.4% ABV

Boo Ya, the finished product (very delicious, I might add):

California Amber Ale

So, there are a lot of crisp, hoppy American amber ales in California that are consumed as freely and broadly as pale ales and IPA's here in Portland. I'm thinking of Mendocino's Red Tail Ale, Speakeasy's Prohibition Ale, North Coast's Red Seal Ale, and plenty of other similar hoppy amber ales. Well, I miss those beers - particularly Red Tail Ale - so I decided to brew something in the same general style of hoppy California-style Amber Ale.

I didn't take any pictures of the brewing process, but it was a somewhat eventful brewday, nonetheless.

Recipe:

8lbs Great Western (US) 2-row
2lbs US Munich 20L
1lb British Medium Crystal (70-75L)
8 oz Victory Malt

1 oz Amarillo (9.0 AA) FWH
.5 oz Zeus CTZ (16.4 AA) 60 min
1 oz Amarillo (9.0 AA) Flameout
.75 oz Centennial (7.8 AA) Flameout
2 oz Zeus CTZ (16.4 AA) Dry-hop

Wyeast 1450 Denny's Favorite 50
Mash at 153 60 min w/mashout

1.052, 13 SRM, 37 IBU

So I wanted to try to get better efficiency this time, and I decided to crush the grains real fine (.225) and mash thin, plus mash-out.

I ended up with too much liquor for my kettle, so I dumped about half of the sparge runoff - but my efficiency was so high that I the gravity was already plenty high. I also planned on doing a 90min boil, but just did 60 (in part because of the super-high efficiency), leaving me with over 6.5 gallons of 1.052 wort - well within my ideal range for this beer. The CTZ have been in my freezer for months, so I figured I would only get about 15% AA from them. It's possible, though, that my IBUs could be as much as 5 points lower or higher than the recipe calls for, depending on how many alpha acids were lost in the 4-6 months of freezer storage.

Also, I may dry-hop this one with 2oz Cascade.

Oh, and i let it chill for about 4 hours, letting so much trub settle that it was already clear going into the fermenter - It will be nice to have such a beautiful, crystal-clear beer coming out of my keg in a month or so.