Blonde Ale

I did another brew in a bag session today. This time it was a blonde ale that I made. Overall I am happy with the process, but I have decided that my kettles are too small and my boil is too vigorous perhaps for this method, so I will use my mash/lauter tun on my next brew day.

Recipe:

5 gallon batch
6 gallon mash

9# Maris Otter
1# Cara-pils
.75# Wheat Malt

1oz EKG @ 60min
~.5oz home grown cascade @10 minutes

After the mash there was under 5 gallons in the brewpot, so I added enough water to get back up to 6-6.5 gallons. This dropped my gravity too low, so I threw in .5# of pilsner DME.

After the boil I had about 4.5 gallons of wort, so once again I added some water, this took me from 1.051 to 1.048. Not too bad, but I was gunning for 1.054. I think I will get some foam control too so I can start my boil closer to 7 gallons from now on. I had one small boil over today that wasted some wort...

My starter looked and smelled great, so I threw the whole thing in to the fermenter and it is down in the basement now and should be fermenting at around 63F.

I really like the time savings that brew in a bag offers, but I just do not have a big enough set up to effectively brew above 1.050 with this method. Since most of my beers tend to run 1.050-1.065 I think I will go back to my cooler mash tun.

I have had the heather ale in the fridge in the garage cold-crashing for the last day and a half and look forward to bottling it tomorrow.

ttfn