while my pint preference has varied over the years from hoppy, to strong, and lately to sour, AP’s (AKA SWMBO‘s) has taken a different course altogether.

• although she thoroughly enjoys the occasional sour and fresh IPA, AP has always leaned towards more malt and yeast-forward selections.  when I hinted last week that I was planning on brewing over the weekend, AP put her foot down and demanded a malty american amber session ale.
• since the only other amber I brewed as of late involved a healthy amount of hops and a high OG, I reformulated my recipe utilizing jmo88’s recipe on homebrewtalk as inspiration (12 gal batch):

• 18.00 lb	Pale Malt (2 Row) US (2.0 SRM)	Grain	77.92 %
  2.00 lb	Caramel/Crystal Malt – 80L (80.0 SRM)	Grain	8.66 %
  2.00 lb	Munich Malt – 10L (10.0 SRM)	Grain	8.66 %
  1.00 lb	Caramel/Crystal Malt – 40L (40.0 SRM)	Grain	4.33 %
  0.10 lb	Chocolate Malt (350.0 SRM)	Grain	0.43 %
  3.00 oz	Cascade [5.50 %] (60 min)	Hops	23.4 IBU
  1.00 oz	Cascade [5.50 %] (Dry Hop 14 days)	Hops	–
  1.00 oz	Williamette [5.50 %] (20 min)	Hops	4.7 IBU
  1.00 oz	Williamette [5.50 %] (10 min)	Hops	2.8 IBU
  1.00 oz	Williamette [5.50 %] (0 min)	Hops	–

• I mashed in at 156F for more malt body, and low AA cascades helped get the IBUs down to under 30.  I spaced out and forgot to take an initial gravity reading, but at my average 80% efficiency the OG should be around 1.055 and should finish around 1.014 for a sessionable 5.3% end result.  I will probably skip the dry hops for five gallons, but may add them and/or apricot puree or extract to the other five for a little something different.
• as for yeast, I used a couple packets of safale S-04, which were a good alternative to liquid yeast during the hot west coast shipping months and which should add even more to the malt spectrum.
• on another note, after kegging my patersbier, I ended up the hop harvest by picking 4.25 oz. of cascade cones off my  in-ground cascade plant  I swapped out of a planter this year.  the cones’ aroma seemed a little subdued, so I will likely end up using them for bittering in an upcoming “local” saison.  stay tuned…

Tags: amber, AP, cascade, malt, patersbier

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 5th, 2011 at 12:19 pm and is filed under beers, brewing. 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.