Irish Red Recap

With St. Patrick's Day fast approaching, Irish Red was a logical choice for brew number two. The grain bill consisted of Pale, Ashburne, Caramel 80, Special Roast, and a little bit of Roast Barley to deepen the color and to help combat the high alkalinity of the water here. The ph of the mash was 5.3, so it definitely helped pull the ph down, but I think it might have darkened the beer a bit too much. I'll wait until it's finished and I can asses it in a pint glass to decide if I need to reduce the amount of Roast.

Overall the brew seemed to go more smoothly than the first one. We had no problems with recirculating the mash and the sparge water flowed through almost too quickly during our one hour sparge. The starting gravity wound up being 1.046, which is a couple points lower than I was hoping for. Next time I'll keep a closer watch on the flow and sparge a little slower.

The batch came to a boil pretty quickly after the kettle was full and I remembered to turn off the bottom steam jacket, so no boilover. The one addition of Glacier hops went in with 60 minutes to go in the boil.

While the batch was whirlpooling, we cropped some yeast off the Calibration Ale. There was very little thick slurry, more like very yeasty beer. We pitched what we had, but I was concerned it wouldn't be enough. When I came in this morning it was bubbling, but very little. I pulled off some more yeast and pushed it into the fermenter with CO2. We'll see how it does, although I probably won't be repitching yeast out of this batch.