Brewer's Best - Red Ale

Ok, I'm starting to brew again, using a boxed recipe, Brewer's Best Red Ale.

I'm using a big, 30 qt, brew kettle for this one. Therefore, instead of the usual add the malt to 2 gal for the boil, then add 3 gal to cool, I'm doing all 5 gal in the one brew pot from the start. Also, before I used municipal water so I could assume it was chlorinated, but now I've got well water. All the more reason to boil it all.

So I start with the crushed grains in the bag provided and heat the water from cold for about 30 minutes until at 1:20 the water temperature is 165 F. By 1:35 I notice that the water temperature is over 170, though I tried to control it, so the grains come out. Drained and squeezed the bag. Put the heat back on and let it boil.

2:05 boil starts, add Malt (2 lbs. Munton's light dry, 3.3 lbs Cooper's light liquid)

2:20 boil up again, add bittering hops (Willamette, 1 oz, 4.5% AA).

3:15 Add finishing hops, (Willamette, 1 oz, 4.5% AA).

3:20 Pull brew pot off of flame and start to cool. I don't have an immersion chiller so the brew pot is sitting in a tub of cold water. It's a cold day outside so it should cool down fairly quickly.

4:42 Following the instructions on the Danstar "Nottingham" dry yeast packet I rehydrate the yeast at 86 F.

5:00 Gently stir the rehydrating yeast. Looks good. Nice even dsitribution of yeast throughout the water. Yeast temperature is 86 F, Wort temperature is 90 F, add a little wort to the yeast and wait. Meanwhile the original gravity is 1.040. Corrected O.G. = 1.044

5:11 The thermometer in the yeast still says 86 F and I've added a lot more wort. I think I need to check my thermometers, do they all agree? In any case, pitch the yeast, add the airlock and seal the fermentor.

Note: I started with 6 gallons in the original boil and ended with just 5 gallons in the fermentor.

Homebrew Software

Well as I start to get ready to resume beer brewing I'm also going to be evaluating a few different software tools for developing, storing and tracking recipes. I've got Qbrew, BeerSmith and ProMash. Now Qbrew has the advantage of being Open Source and is therefore free. A hard price to beat. So far it is also the one I've looked at the most. It seems to be a bit less extensive in its abilities than the other two. ProMash, in particular, would seem to be able to do anything. Qbrew also has an annoying behavior in that changes to the database (what malts or hops are available) do not immediately show up in the program. When I add something I have to shut down and restart. It is, however, easy to use and will output the recipe in BeerXML format, which I like. I want to try a put together a set of tools, (XML, XSL and the like, perhaps including a MySQL database) for storing and displaying recipes. Using the BeerXML standard would be cool.

ProMash seems almost too complex, even intimidating, but I haven't looked at it very much so far. ProMash is billed as being usable for professional brewing, so it's imposing nature shouldn't be surprising. Also, it does not output in any XML format, although there exists a VB tool for converting ProMash text format into BeerXML format. ProMash also costs about $20, it is not free.

The BeerSmith tool also costs about $20. I've only started looking at it today. BeerSmith seems to be pretty easy to use, somewhat less imposing than ProMash. It also, like Qbrew, will output into BeerXML format. It has a nice feature of keeping up with inventory and putting together a shopping list. ProMash can do much the same.