We had a wwoofer from France staying with us, and after tasting some of the home-brew, wanted to learn about brewing beer himself. So, we took a visit to the local HBS and bought a kit, more to show him the basics and how easy it is brew beer yourself. I decided on making a Brown Ale, akin to Newcastle or any generic Northern Brown Ale. Essentially, I followed the recipe suggestion that Brewcraft make for making a Newkie Brown….
- 1x Brewcraft (Munotns) Brown Ale kit
- 1.5kg Black Rock Pale LME
- 250g corn syrup
- 200g Chocolate malt (steeped 30mins)
- 1x Fuggles Hops plug (5.4% Alpha acid)
- ½ tab Irish Moss
- Wyeast 1335 British Ale II yeast (from starter)
Steeped grains at 65-67C for half-hour. Brought 2-4Lt water to boil, added kit wort, LME, corn syrup, and steeped grain wort. Once everything was dissolved, added Irish moss and the Fuggles plug, stirred through and turned flame out. Left for a while to cool down.
Strained wort whilst pouring into fermenter, and topped up water to 25 Lt.
- OG: 1.091
This was rather weird, and we could not work out why there was such a high gravity – especially given this was a beer made from a kit wort.
Had some interesting stuff happen with the yeast starter too. This was the first time I actually used any of the British Ale II yeast starters I made back in April, and my starter did not krausen – but clearly the yeast cells had multiplied.
The Final Gravity reading was 1.014 a couple of weeks later, and I bulk-primed with 120g Brown Sugar.
The consensus with the exceptionally high OG was that there may have been a deal of sediment in the tap, and thus got a false reading. For the sake of it, I am going to take the estimated SG as calculated by my copy of Promash, which was 1.044.
If this is correct, this batch should be around 4% Alc/Vol.
Let this be a lesson to all who read this: ensure you take accurate gravity readings. Drawing some more beer out of the fermenter and taking a second reading would have most likely confirmed for us what was really going on….
