Brew 16 - The Beer That Went Clear

5.0% American Pale Ale

Brewday 31 May 2014

There were a lot of firsts in the making of this beer. It was the first time I'd cold crashed with a fridge, the first time I'd fined with gelatin and the first time I'd done proper water manipulation. I obtained a set of mini-scales to weigh the salts on, as can be seen below:

There was no special plan for the beer, it was just an exercise in trying out some new techniques more than anything, so I decided a 5.0% pale ale would be just fine for this.

MASH
Grain		Amt (g)	Amt (%)
Maris Otter Low Colour		4600	92.0
Caramalt		250	5.0
		0	0.0
		0	0.0
		0	0.0
		0	0.0
Torrified Wheat		150	3.0
Total		5000

BOIL
Time	60	10	0	Dry	Total
Hops	Citra		Citra	Citra T90
Alpha (%)	14.0		14.0	12.8
Amount (g)	7		125	125	257.0
Amt / L	0.3	0.0	5.0	5.4
Total AA (g)	0.98	0	17.5
Gravity	1.052		1.052
Utilisation	0.26		0.05	0
IBU (mg/L)	10.2	0.0	35.0	0.0	45.2

Sorry for the poor layout. The recipe is copied from the spreadsheet I use. I'll try to find a better way of displaying them in the future. The lower table shows three hop additions; 7g at 60 mins, 125g at 0 mins and a 125g dry hop.

The last few beers had had a fair bit of "craft haze" about them so I paid a lot of attention to technique during this brew, with the aim of trying to get it clearer. I recirculated the first runnings for longer and went out and bought a second-hand fridge off ebay halfway through, which was useful as I could now cold-crash properly. This, combined with using gelatin as a fining agent, worked wonders and resulted in the clearest beer I'd ever made.

Unfermented wort

Before cold crash

After cold crash

I took a case along to my mate Dan's 40th birthday party, where it went down very well. Having a dedicated brew fridge is really useful and I now don't know how I managed without one for so long!