FOOLCiRCLE

Today was the first time I brewed since Labor Day weekend and brewed a beer I haven’t brewed since 2007, the S.A.W. Pale Ale.

The S.A.W. Pale Ale is a pale ale brewed with a combination of Simcoe, Amarillo, and Warrior hops, thus the S.A.W. abbreviation. I also use the Dogfish Head continuous hopping method for this beer where the hops are added at the same rate throughout the brew. So for this beer it has a 2 to 1 ration of Amarillo to the other two hops, I then mixed the hops all together so the three hops are indistinguishable, and then measure out a consistent amount, half an ounce for this batch, and add it continuously at at a set rate, every eight minutes for this batch. Also, I suppose I should mention that I wasn’t able to find whole leaf Warrior hops so I substituted with whole leaf Zeus hops, so I suppose this is really the S.A.Z. Pale Ale, but whatever.

The brew day went well enough, I went into it already exhausted which means I am really beat right now. There was no major mishaps that went down only a couple little hiccups. Didn’t realize I was out of Whirlfloc so there is a higher potential for a not as clear beer. I forgot to oxygenate my wort until after I added my yeast, really not a big deal at all just a little out of sequence then normal. I ran out of propane while heating the mash out water, really not a big deal either since I had a back up ready to go. And I’m a little nervous about my yeast starter, 1000ml of WLP001 that was a month out of date. Theoretically it should be fine, but, I dunno, it didn’t seem “right”. Other than that I got four carboys cleaned, two kegs cleaned, two beers transferred and dry hopped, and wrapped the brew day in less than seven hours. So, though I am exhausted, and there was a couple hoops to jump through, the day went well.

I transfered the APA with Saison Yeast, which of course meant that I sampled it. It was interesting, the final gravity was nice and low (unlike the Saison itself … hmmm), the american hops stood out brightly and the Saison yeast gave it an interesting twist though I would have preferred a more peppery contribution. We’ll see, should be in kegs soon, and then who knows when it will go on tap. Speaking of which, I just put two new beers on tap, the American Brown I brewed with Heather and Robert back in August and the plain Saision. I still have the Perle American Wheat on tap too. I’ll try to write a review of the two new beers this week. Lined up to be tapped next is the Chocolate Brown and the Sage and Peppercorn Saison, both of those should be interesting!

This entry was posted on Monday, October 18th, 2010 at 7:19 pm and is filed under Homebrew. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.