Batch #6 - Holiday Prowler Ale

Sunday we brewed our 6th batch, and man did it smell awesome!  It definitely felt like fall in the air with the smells of cinnamon, nutmeg, allspice, and oranges.  We had a great audience this week during our brew day, most every neighbor stopped by for a sample!  On tap was some of Batch #2, I think we went through at least half of that keg.

Brewing went mostly smooth, learned a new lesson at the start.  We were having issues getting the wort pump primed, and we determined it had to do with the lack of gravity pressure on the line.  The way we corrected was to throw more water into the mash tun (pre-mash) so there was more pressure on the output.  Once the water started flowing properly through the HERMS, we put the excess water not needed for the mash back into the HLT for later use.  Worked like a charm!

This holiday ale recipe was first brewed by us last year as an extract brew.  We rushed the brew window a bit because we wanted it ready for Christmas.  It ended up tasting so good, we brewed another batch a couple of weeks later.  This is our first attempt at converting an extract recipe to an all-grain.  We are brewing it a bit early in case we want to make any tweaks so we have time to make it again.  I think it will end up turning out great though.  Even with that said, we sampled a little of this brew before pitching the yeast, and I think we are going to want to make another simply because we are going to blow right through the first batch!

Here was the recipe:

20 lbs - US 2-Row
3.6 lbs - Clover Honey
3.5 lbs - Crystal Malt 20L
1 lb - Chocolate Malt

Mash was for 60 minutes at 154 degrees.  Boil for 60 minutes.  Here were the hops:

64.5 g - Cluster for last 45 min
64.5 g - Willamette for last 15 min

Here were the spices:

9 - Cinnamon Sticks
1.2 tsp - Nutmeg
2.5 - Vanilla Beans (split, scraped, then chopped)
3.6 tsp - Ground Cloves
17 - Allspice
5 - Zest of Oranges

Lastly we added 2 wirfloc tablets for clarification.  For our yeast we pitched two different yeasts, one in each 5-gallon carboy.

White Labs WLP0013 - London Ale Yeast
WYEAST 1968 - London ESB Ale

I went with the London ESB Ale yeast because the store was out of my London Ale Yeast I needed.  The guy who worked there said he strongly recommended this yeast for holiday ales, so I'm giving it a try.  We later realized they had the London Ale Yeast in their White Labs stock which is why I have that too.

The attenuation of the London ESB Ale yeast is a bit lower, so this means the beer may not have as high of an ABV (alcohol level) as the carboy that has the London Ale yeast.  This is so because attenuation of the London Ale yeast is higher.  We'll see though.  We started with a very high OG of 1.073.  It has the potential to be around 7.34% ABV.

Here are some other stats for this beer:

IBU's - 28.20
Color - 18.3 SRM
Calories - 222 (going to be filling!)
OG - 1.073
Anticipated FG - 1.017
Anticipated ABV - 7.34%

We actually also hit 90% efficiency as well on this batch.  I suspect we were so high because we were using honey which is pure sugar basically.  Normally we are around 83-85% efficiency right now.

Lastly, we are going to ferment at 68 degrees over 5-7 days.  We will then transfer to secondary for clarifying for another 7 days.  The last three days of secondary we will cold crash down to 36 degrees for further clarification.

That's it for now!

Between Brews Update

I've been working through quite the wave of travel, which has delayed some brews.  If all goes well tomorrow though I might start the Holiday Ale now.  I am thinking it will be good to give it a test run before the holidays so I can brew another batch if needed.

Even though we didn't brew lately, I have some updates on the last brew.  I don't think our Banana Ale is going to turn out with much banana (again).  This may end up being NSBA2 (Not So Banana Ale 2).  I allowed this to sit in primary fermentation for two weeks at 72 degrees.  This temp should be high enough to produce the banana esters.  In addition I did not pitch the entire pack of yeast into these batches, which should have helped with the under pitching.  I'm left scratching my head a little.

This is our third attempt at brewing a banana ale.  Our first attempt had banana flavors, though they were more subtle than I wanted.  We did this at 72 degrees, but it was a higher gravity brew.  It had a lot of honey in the recipe which helped make it higher gravity, but it was a bit too heavy of a beer.  The banana flavor was very strong in this beer when we transferred from primary to secondary.  However at kegging it almost went completely away, but with a little aging it came back stronger after a few weeks.

The next batch we did as a simpler ale recipe without the honey.  The gravity was much lower, and I ended up fermenting at 76 degrees in an attempt to get more banana flavor.  However the end result had no banana flavor at all.

This batch I tried to get the best of all worlds.  I used a wheat ale recipe which had a higher gravity (not as high as the first, but not far off), and fermented again at 72 degrees.  As mentioned above I also tried to under pitch by not using all the yeast.  I thought for sure this would work!

My results so far are after 2 weeks in primary I transferred to secondary.  I did not keg yet as all my kegs are full.  I put the secondaries into the fermentation chamber and cold crashed it to help clear the beer.  That is where it is right now, been there almost a week.  When smelling and tasting after transferring I got no scent or flavor of banana, however I might have picked up a hint of clove.  This is odd because this yeast does produce clove flavors if fermented at cooler temps.  My only hope is that banana flavor will surface after a few weeks of conditioning.  If this doesn't work I'm going to go to another strand of yeast to try.  There are a few that produce banana flavor, this just happens to be the most flocculant which results in a clearer beer.

I am also slowly carbonating several of the kegs and will post tasting notes shortly on those.  Right now I'm sampling from batch#4 which is almost done carbonating.  I also have one of batch#2 kegs carbonated now.  I have also started carbonating the Saison we brewed over the summer, which is our last extract batch I have on hand.  It tasted a little rough at kegging, so I let it condition for a couple of months.

Tasting notes to come shortly, and maybe a brew day tomorrow!