Irish Red

My latest brew was an Irish Red - no, I don't really know what one of those is either. Inspired by an episode of the Jamil Show I decided to brew one to Jamil's recipe and see how it came out. From what I understand it will be pretty close to an English bitter, which is good because I've been meaning to brew one of those too! Lately I've been trying to get more methodical in planning my brew-days and be a bit more disciplined with what I brew when. I've been trying to re-use yeast to save some money, but also to take advantage of the better yeast flavour from successive generations. So, no more buying a new yeast for each brew and jumping from style to style. Well, less of that anyway.

So this recipe will be the first brew using WLP004 Irish ale yeast. Following this brew I intend to make a couple of stouts - probably an oatmeal followed by a coffee stout. I've not properly decided yet, but I reckon this is a good yeast to try them with - it's supposed to be the Guinness strain. All of the brews I'm doing at have half an eye on the National Homebrew Competition in the summer. If any of these turn out well, they could be my entries. Anyway, here's the recipe:

Ingredients

Amt Name Type # %/IBU 5.10 kg Maris Otter Low Colour Pale Malt (2.5 EBC) Grain 1 92.1 % 0.17 kg Caramel/Crystal Malt - 40L (78.8 EBC) Grain 2 3.1 % 0.17 kg Crystal Malt 120 (240.0 EBC) Grain 3 3.1 % 0.10 kg Black Barley (Stout) (985.0 EBC) Grain 4 1.8 % 35.00 g EKG 2011 [5.40 %] - Boil 60.0 min Hop 5 24.6 IBUs 1.00 tsp Irish Moss (Boil 15.0 mins) Fining 6 - 1.0 pkg Irish Ale Yeast (White Labs #WLP004) Yeast 7 -

It's a pretty simple recipe, and the brew-day went pretty smoothly. The only issue I had was with the grain bill. From looking through the grain list in Beersmith I can see there's a much lighter roasted barley, around 500 EBC. However, I can't find this grain for sale anywhere so I've had to use the darker black barley. I think the lighter grain would give the red colour without so much roastiness, so I reduced the amount of black barley to allow for this. It probably won't turn out exactly as it is designed to, but it's as close as I can get it.

After the boil the O.G. was 1.052, so bang on what I wanted. I pitched a 1.5 litre starter of yeast (just the slurry) and off it went. I kept the fermenter at 20C using the water bath, so it's possible it crept over that as the yeast really got going, but generally that's where it was. According to the style guidelines, this should finish no lower than 1.010, and waddya know - 1.013 after 11 days!

A pretty muddy looking beer at the moment, but that'll settle out... right?

Today I filled 40 bottles with this and had a bit left over, but no more bottles. Have to hope it's good now! The tastings I've had from the times I've tested the S.G. have all been promising. Good body, interesting malty character, with roasty overtones too. I thought it tasted a little sharp today too, but that's the only time I've tasted it, so I might've been mistaken. The malt flavours should blend more as it conditions in the bottle and work together quite well. I'm looking forward to tasting it when it's ready!

One learning point from the bottling session today, is to always bottle cold. I had the beer sat at 20C right up until I bottled it and as a result, got loads of CO2 bubbles in the tube when bottling. What I should've done is switch off the heater a day earlier, then let it cool overnight. This would also probably help with the clarity of the beer - not long term, but today the beer looked pretty muddy. A day or so in the cold would've helped drop the yeast out of suspension.