Gabel Road Cream Ale 3.0

 

A day off from rehearsal on the eve of opening night lends the opportunity to brew some more on my new electric brew system. Which I am now calling the "Gabel Road Brewery". Why not.

The first batch at Gabel Road was a five gallon batch of porter recipe from 1880. Today will be a ten gallon batch of the Cream Ale I began working on last summer. I produced about 40 gallons of it over the course of about 3 months playing with grist combinations and IBU's. Fairly quickly I settled on Lemondrop hops because of the tropical "shandy" like flavor character it produced and everyone who tried it gave it a thumbs up.

As popular as the Lemondrop hops were however I always wondered how Saaz would work? Hoping for a Pilsner/Lager character in my Cream Ale, this is the plan for today's brew! During the planning of the recipe I read that Saaz combines well with Styrian Golding so why not try that too.

Look over the recipe and note the AA (alpha acid) percentage of the hops in the recipe and the predicted IBU then I'll tell you where the wheels came off...

 

I have specific parameters for Cream Ale: the grist should be near 80% base malt with adjuncts, if any, contributing the remaining 20%. The OG should be no higher than 1.050 to 1.052. And the IBU's should be no higher that 20... 18 to 20 IBU being ideal in my estimation. All of these boxes are checked or close enough in the this recipe

The while shopping for ingredients I failed to check the AA percentage on the packages of hops that I bought. Instead of the Styrian Goldings being 5.25 they were 1.8%! And the Saaz were only 2.8% instead of 3.75! I quickly rummaged through the refrigerator crisper drawer where I store hops and yeast (my wife loves that) and found a package of Hallertau at 3.6% AA. That will fit in well with the Pilsner/Lager hops flavor profile I'm after and using those in the bittering addition will boost my IBU to almost 17. Crisis averted but not the end of my problems.

When I first crafted this ten gallon recipe I was using my previous brew rig made of converted 15.5 gallon beer kegs. If you note the boil size at the top of the recipe it is 14.24 gallons of wort into the boil kettle. That barely worked in those keggles but now I'm using 15 gallon stainless steel kettles that have ports punched through the sides near the top... making the effective total volume of them about 13+ gallons.

First came the sound of liquid splashing on the table top. Then came the unavoidable boil-over. And now the realization that I'm leaving behind one and a quarter gallons of wort in the mash tun. What are you going to do? Those are the things you have to contend with when making beer.

With about 30 minutes left in the boil the volume in the kettle had reduced through evaporation and I took a chance and added some of that wort still in the mash tun into the boil kettle. Otherwise I was going to be short of my 11 gallon batch size. When all was said and done I ended up with just under 11 gallons into the fermenter.

Fingers crossed this will come out OK. Here's the video evidence of all that calamity...

1880 Whitbread Porter

The bad news is that I did not brew the Founders Porter clone. That means my Glengarry Glen Ross cast-mates did not get their "Coffee (Is For Closers) Porter. The good news is that I did finally get to brew on my new electric brewery the other day but instead of attempting the Founders clone what I brewed was a nearly 140 year old porter recipe found in Ron Pattinson's blog... or one of his books I can't remember.

The Brew Day!
With a small break in the weather last week and the last of the tweaks finished on my brew system it was time to dive in. Mistakes were made but all of them minor... I miscalculated my strike temperature and my mash began lower than planned. Better to start low and ramp up to the desired temp that start too hot and denature your grains, right. There were ball valves that were not turned on when they should be and others that were left open when they shouldn't. And one or two others which did not affect the outcome of the beer at all. My volumes all ended up where predicted and the gravity readings were only off by a few points (1.053 instead of 1.051 OG) due to me intentionally setting my mash efficiency a bit low for the firs run through.

In the end I finished with 6 gallons of Porter in the fermenter and it is chugging along happily as I write this. The recipe follows but keep reading to watch the video!

The plan is to compare this with the Founders clone recipe and see how they compare with the goal of developing my own "house" porter to keep on hand on a regular basis. Meantime, the "house" ale that I worked on last summer needs to be brewed again soon. I'm thinking that within the next week or two I need to make another batch of my Gabel Road Cream Ale. Until then, here is the video I shot of the 1880 Whitbread Porter session...