Pale Ale

It has been a while since I have been able to brew due to house renovations, travel with work and the garage being a storage space for accumulated bits and pieces. With Coronovirus and social isolation, my weekends are now much clearer, so time to get back to my favorite hobby.

Decided to start with a Pale Ale from Greg Hughes excellent How to Brew book, although ingredients were altered slightly based on what I had to hand.

Setup

I decided to treat myself to the WiFi link for the Spiedel – which was fine to fit but took a bit of fiddling to get the firmware updates loaded. The benefit is it makes it much easier to setup recipes and download them to the Braumeister, as well as track the progress of the brew.

• Spiedel Braumeister 20l
• Brewery temperature: 11°C
• Humidity: 65%

Water treatment

25l water treated with one crushed Campden tablet, 13ml AMS and 15.5g of DWB.

Grain bill

I didn’t have Extra Pale malt so went with what I had.

• 4300g Pale Malt (should have been Extra Pale)
• 95g Cara Hell

Mash Schedule

Created the recipe and mash schedule on MySpiedel as follows:

• 38°C: Mash in
• 52°C: 20 min
• 63°C: 35 min
• 73°C: 35 min
• 78°C: 10 min

I’m still researching the best mash schedules to use for different results. This one was the default one referenced in the Bruameister manual, but have found other resources online that provide additional guidance. I’ll put the links in a separate post.

Boil

Boil for 70 mins

Hop Schedule

• Challenger – 35g @ start of boil
• East Kent Goldings – 23g @ turn off
• Styrian Goldings – 16g @ turn off

Fermentation

Chilled wort through plate chiller to 18°C. Although I was using the hop sieve the outlet still got clogged up with hops. Think I will try a hop spider to remove the problem completely.

In the end I only got 15 litres out of the Braumeister which is way less than I wanted. Will need to play with liquor levels but not having a blocked outlet will also help.

• WLP005 British Ale Yeast
• OG: 1040

Fermented at 18°C for 5 days then turned up to 19°C and then 20°C over the next two days.

Cooled to 12°C for 2 weeks.