The Amber Ale finally get's brewed!

Sunday was another brew day for me and I finally got round to brewing the American Amber Ale recipe from John Palmer's "How to brew".

This was supposed to be brew #2, but the porter took precedence over that. Then I was going to brew it on my last brew day, only to find I hadn't ordered the crystal malt I needed! So at long last I got round to brewing it and it turned out to be one of my most successful brew days to date! Now, I must state the caveat that I don't know how the beer will finally turn out, but in terms of how the day went, I class it a success.

In previous days I've been guilty of not preparing enough and not checking my recipe beforehand. Not this time! My recipe was double checked and ordered in plenty of time, my starter was made in time, and there were no unwelcome surprises on the day. I even remembered to hold back six litres of liquor from the mash, so I could use it to make temperature adjustments.

I finished only one point off my target gravity at 1.053 after the boil, so I was pretty pleased with the day.

Two things I learned:

1 - When I use a slow lauter, as I have been the past couple of brews, my system has an efficiency of roughly 75%. By 'slow' I mean 30-40 minutes, then batch sparge, then 30-40 mins to run that off too (As a side note I think I can afford to do this quicker, but I'll experiment with this in future). This is really useful to finally get a handle on, as future recipe design can now be a lot more accurate. When I first started brewing I assumed that I wouldn't be very efficient and I think that led to my first brews finishing high; being stronger versions of the beers they were supposed to be (Robust Porter, I'm looking at you). I assumed that my own skill as a brewer would translate to system efficiency, and while this is true to an extent, the system also has an inherent efficiency. I think my research/decisions on what equipment to buy, and whether to buy a false bottom, paid off here and resulted in a system which will be pretty efficient. I'm guessing that the false bottom helps quite a bit in drawing wort evenly from throughout the mash.

2 - In future I will be skimming my boil. My first couple of brews clogged up the hop filter when it came to draining out of the boiler, so a couple of brews ago I decided to skim the foam off the top of the wort when the boil hit. To my surprise, when I did this the hope filter stayed clear and the boiler drained like the proverbial racehorse! However, at brew-club I asked a couple of people about skimming and the consensus was that it was a bad idea; the proteins help with head retention and clarity of the beer, the real problem was my hop filter. So yesterday I experimented and only partly skimmed the boil, result? Hop filter gummed up again and an extra 30-40 minutes was wasted at the end of the day. So next time I will be skimming. There's quite a good discussion of skimming on this excellent blog: http://www.themadfermentationist.com/2012/09/do-you-skim-off-foam-as-your-wort-comes.html I have to say I agree with him completely. I've not noticed my skimmed beer being less clear, so I'm inclined to believe that the anti-skimming is all based on rumour that has acquired the status of fact through repetition!

I say I learned these things today because this was the first brew day that I've been happy with. I can treat this as a control that I'll aim to repeat in future. I might make mistakes, or even find improvements to my methods, but I'll be able to measure their impact against days like yesterday.