Birallee Beer & Brewing: American Cliche - American Amber Ale

Here's our debrief from our latest brew day where we brought our American Cliche' American Amber Ale recipe to life.

Water Preparation

As usual, our brew day actually starts the night before when we setup our BrewZilla and Digiboil, pre-fill them with water and add our water salts (calcium chloride and calcium sulphate). Since we brew at night time, doing as much as possible the night before helps can reduce the time taken on brew night.

Our BrewZilla was filled to 23L for strike water.

Milling Grains

No action shots of milling the grains, but here's the end result. We go for a relatively coarse crush that still leaves plenty of the hulls intact and gives us a fairly decent recirculation rate during the mash.

The Mash

After an uneventful mashing in, we were pretty close to our target temperature of 67°C, as measured with our RAPT temperature probe.

Sparge Water Adjustment

After mashing in we turned our attention to adjusting the pH of our sparge water. We over-acidified initially, getting down to well under 4.9, when our ideal target is 5.2-5.3. The easiest method we've found to raise the pH is to simply add some more filtered tap water, which we did, and after adding 2L back into the Digiboil, we had a pH of 5.3.

Increasing the sparge water would arguably have an impact on the mineral (calcium/sulphate levels) of the sparge water but we don't anticipate this would be significant - getting the pH right is far more important.

The Mash

Now that the mash water pH was adjusted, we turned our attention back to the mash. After beginning to recirculate the wort after an initial rest of 10 minutes, we took our first pH reading of 5.39. A little higher than we were expecting so we added 1mL of phosphoric acid.

Close up image of the recirculation and you can see the nice amber colour already starting to come through.

We then took another pH reading of the mash which came in a 5.27. Close enough to our target of 5.3

Another recirculation shot of the wort

A final pH reading of the mash just before starting a mash out and we've seen a slight uptick from the previous reading, now at 5.31 - perfect.

Mash Out

After a 60 minute mash we began raising the temperature of the BrewZilla from 67°C to 75°C for the 10 minute mash out.

Pro tip: Putting the lid on the BrewZilla when raising the temperature helps get it there much faster than doing so with the lid off!

Sparging

After the 10 minute mash out period, we lifted the grain basket and began sparging.

We opted for a slightly different sparging technique this time around. Previously we would keep adding sparge water until we reached our preboil volume. This time though, we only added the amount of sparge water that was suggested in the Brewfather recipe (~8L from memory).

This meant the sparge took slightly longer than it normally would have, but we're wondering if continuously adding water perhaps dilutes the runnings more? Guess we'll find out!

The Boil

We hit our pre-boil volume of 28L and set the BrewZilla to HH - no idea why it's called HH but that's the hottest setting.

We took a pre-boil gravity reading which came in at 1.047, a single point higher than the expected 1.046.

Next, we took a pre-boil pH reading of 5.25 - a slight drop from the end-of-mash pH reading of 5.31, which means we got a slight pH increase from sparging.

Brewing lore states that the pH typically drops during the boil process, so no further adjustments were made to the pH at this point.

While waiting for the BrewZilla to reach a boil, we weighed out our 60 minute hop addition - 11g of Warrior hops. We like the clean, neutral bittering profile we get from Warrior hops so it's our go to for these start of boil hop additions.

Some hot break starting to form as the BrewZilla starts to near a boil.

And now the boil is underway!

After adding our 60 minute boil addition there were no other additions required for 50 minutes so we used to time to begin measuring out everything else - like our yeast nutrient, whirlfloc and 10 minute hop addition.

And of course our whirlpool hop additions.

With a bit under 10 minutes left in the boil, we took another pH reading which came in a 5.27, a slight increase from the pre-boil reading of 5.25.

Despite everything we've read suggesting that pH should drop during the boil, in our experience it never has. Our end of boil pH target is 5.1, so we added 1mL of phosphoric acid to help drop it down.

After waiting a few minutes, we took another sample and pH reading which came in at 5.14. Close enough for us to our target of 5.1.

Whirlpool/Hop Stand

At the conclusion of the 60 minute boil, we dropped the temperature of the wort to 80°C-85°C for our whirlpool.

Once we hit the target temperature we added our whirlpool hops and began recirculating using the whirlpool arm attachment.

After our 15 minute whirlpool we then continued chilling the wort and took another gravity reading which came in a 1.054. A few points higher than the expected 1.051 from the recipe.

We double checked the gravity using a floating hydrometer as well which confirmed the reading was at least 1.054 - probably more like 1.055.

We then transferred the wort into our Apollo Titan fermenter, which conveniently was already at 20°C - our target fermentation/yeast pitching temperature.

However, for this batch we're using liquid yeast for the first time, and we didn't anticipate getting the temperature of the wort down so low (forgetting the ground water is much colder in winter like it is now), so the yeast was still in the fridge and not at room temperature so not ready for pitching.

No big deal, we left the fermenter in the fridge overnight, which was probably a good thing as it turns out because the temperature ended up dropping down to 17°C in the fridge, even with a heat mat present. We're guessing from the residual cold from everything else that was still in the fridge.

So it turns out that waiting until the next day (night) was the right call, because we also needed to oxygenate the wort, something we've never actually done before.

Wort Oxygenating

We used our Spike Brewing Oxygenation Kit, and hit the wort with 3 minutes of oxygen at a flow rate of 1/4 L/min as per the recommendations from Spike.

Here's a close up of the regulator attached to the oxygen gas bottle.

We hooked up the carbonation stone via a sightglass to the fermenter which enabled us to view the oxygenation happening, and also meant we could shut off the ball valve in the sightglass once oxygenation was complete so we could remove and clean/rinse the carbonation stone and not leave it connected to the fermenter for the duration of fermentation.

After oxygenating the wort we pitched our yeast which is the Mogwai Labs MOG-103 Golden State ale yeast, part of a prize we won in a previous homebrew competition.

We had signs of fermentation underway within 12 hours which we take as an indication that the yeast were happy with how we prepared the wort for them!

Dry Hopping

48 hours after pitching the yeast we could see fermentation was slowing down so we prepared our dry hop, which is relatively small at only 45g in total comprising an equal split of Amarillo, Cascade and Centennial hops.