Amber Ale -- August 6th, 2008

I'm obviously going back quite a ways to retell this story, and I apologize in advance for embellishing or distorting any of the actual events. I do that sometimes.

The first thing I notice when I open the brick-and-mortar brewing journal, so to speak, is the exhaustive quality of its earliest entries. Here's precisely what appears in our first entry.

4:10pm, 8/6/2008
Begin heating
1.5 gal water
(grain in bag): 8oz crushed crystal malt, 4oz black patent malt, 4oz chocolate malt
also soaking two 1.5 kilo cans of Cooper's Amber malt extract in hot water

4:20-4:25
Removed grain with strainer (ed. note -- sparging grains loose was a dumb idea)

4:25-4:30
Added 2 1.5 kilo cans of Amber extract

4:31
Boiling begins

4:33
Cluster bittering hops added (1oz 7.4% alpha acid)

4:36
Clean break

5:10
Added .5oz Willamette finishing hops (alpha acid 4.1%)

5:20
Strain out hops and remaining [grains]

6:07
Specific gravity = 1.048, temp 83 degrees

Yeast hydrated in 105-deg water for 10 minutes; yeast added, beer moved downstairs.

COMMENTARY -- I'll do this after each stage, I think. It's easier than doing it all at once at the end.

This was my first batch of beer ever; it had been a few years since Aaron had brewed anything. We were incredibly nervous, cautious to the point of paranoia not only about recording every little thing we did with regards to the process, but also about religiously sanitizing our equipment and following the recipe to the letter. We were using a kit that Swoboda had purchased in Seattle and had been toting around for a number of years. When it came out too sweet (and probably too low in alcohol content), we tentatively blamed the old yeast.

Before we ever started the fire under the wort, we spent a good amount of time with our new bible, "The Complete Joy of Home Brewing," by Charlie Papazian. Incredibly, given the hours we spent poring over specific-gravity tables, pictorial how-to guides, and so on, we somehow managed to ignore the author's most important advice, which he includes at the beginning and the end of nearly every section in the book: "Don't worry. Relax. Have a home brew." I guess we didn't have any home brew at the time. But a beer sure would have calmed us down.

Interesting things I notice now -- for an Amber Ale, one and a half ounces of hops is not a lot; that brew could have used more bitterness. Similarly, we only boiled for, what, 40 minutes? A standard boil, it turns out, is an hour long. I don't know what the effect of a shorter boil is -- or was -- but it probably didn't allow all that bitterness and hop flavor to get into our beer. Also, I notice that none of our paranoia -- which I remember quite clearly -- makes it into the journal. The number of times we had to re-sterilize instruments or our hands or whatever, the shrillness of the cries -- "Wait! Did that spoon just touch your pant leg? Re-sterilize!" -- are comical to recall. Not that we're less careful now (though we probably are), but dealing with wort is more familiar to us. The idea that we started to brew a simple beer at 4:10 and didn't move it downstairs until 6:15 speaks to how unpracticed our operation was. Today, we not only brewed up our Stout, but we also transferred a porter to its secondary and added oak cubes for flavor, and we dry-hopped our ESB and took it off the yeast, as well. And we did a 60-minute boil. But the whole operation was over in about the same amount of time. We're way more efficient now.

Plus, the very memory of having to store a fermenting ale in the basement because it was the only place in the house cold enough to keep the yeast active -- and we could only hope that the temperature remained below 75 degrees -- is nothing but a memory to me. Now we ferment next to the radiator upstairs, as it's the only place in which the temperature might stay above 60 degrees all the time. Snow is falling out the window. Back to the journal.

8/17/2008
Specific gravity=1.019. Beer is cloudy, yeast on surface, no bubbles coming out of lock after second day. Smells like beer. Tastes like beer, but still malty and sweet. Did the yeast do its job?

8/18/2008
Specific gravity=1.019

8/19/2008
Specific gravity=1.016. Racked beer into glass carboy. Mold and scum on airlock (at waterline).

8/23/2008
Bottled. Specific gravity=1.017

COMMENTARY:
Not only was the finishing gravity high, but we sucked at measuring it -- after this episode, I stopped involving myself in the data-taking part of the process entirely. I mean, what's more likely -- that the SG actually dropped .003 in one day after so much time in the primary, or that one of us, most likely me, misread the SG on one or more occasions? And there's no way the SG went UP ever. Unbelievable. Back to the journal:

9/1/2008
First tasting. Super malty, like a Belgian more than an Amber. Very dark, very sweet, very heavy.

COMMENTARY:
Matty loved this brew, but it didn't come out how we wanted. I recall the whole batch being too sweet, but the first taste will always be a little off. Most batches get better -- more clear and more even in taste -- with substantial age. We opened the first amber less than a month after we initially brewed it; it was bound to taste a bit juvenile. The other day, we opened a porter for the first time that we brewed roughly a month ago. It, too, was a little bit sweeter than we might have wanted. We'll see what it's like at thanksgiving, after aging in bottles for three or so additional weeks. Again, though, with respect to the amber. I don't ever recall it tasting any less malty, or getting any more clear. Looking at the ingredients, though, we were using extremely dark grains -- it was half dark and chocolate and half crystal malt. The stout recipe we just brewed was identical except it was 2/3 dark and 1/3 light. Not a tremendous difference. I don't know how they expected an amber color out of those grains.