Three-Eyed Cat Pale Ale Brewday 1/4/11

This was our first brew, and I was pretty anxious about everything. I had been reading at length about everything that could go wrong in brewing and I tried to do everything possible to make sure our first brew went right. I used a recipe that's very popular online, Edwort's Haus Pale Ale (http://www.homebrewtalk.com/f66/bee-cave-brewery-haus-pale-ale-31793/).

I subbed in 0.2 oz of Nugget at 60 minutes to correct for our Cascade's lower AA%.

Batch size: 5.5 gallons

Boil volume: 6.5 gallons

Calculated OG: 1.052

Measured FG: 1.012

Calculated ABV: 5.2%

Calculated IBUs (Tinseth): 33

Vol. CO2: 2.6

Yeast: Safale US-05

Pitching temp: 70F

Fermentation high: 70F

Fermentation low: 57F (day 9)

Days in primary: 11

Fermentation vessel: Ale Pail

Lag time: less than 18 hours

6.5 lbs Extra Pale LME

1.5 lbs Munich LME (40% Munich)

0.5 lbs Crystal 10L

4.7 oz of sucrose at bottling

1.0 oz Cascade 5% AA at 60 minutes

0.2 oz Nugget 12.2% AA at 60 minutes

0.5 oz Cascade 5% AA at 30 minutes

0.25 oz Cascade 5% AA at 15 minutes

0.25 oz Cascade 5% at 5 minutes

We cleaned my grandmother's big aluminum stock pot and then boiled water in it for 30 minutes to rebuild an oxide layer. (I'm not sure if I believe in this.) We discarded the water, then added more water for brewing. We treated all the water except the steeping water with an inexact portion of a campden tablet. We steeped the crystal malt in a smaller pot with no bag, then strained the steeping water into the brew pot. I like this method and may use it again.

We added half the extract at the start, and half at 5 minutes. We have continued using this extract-late method for all of our brews. We cooled and poured the wort into the ale pail, and there was airlock activity within 18 hours.

We bottled on 1/15/10. We soon discovered that there were some bottles we couldn't cap, which resulted in a few uncarbonated beers being drunk. In total we'd brewed 53, but only bottled 48. The beers were fully carbed in 2 weeks, and quite tasty. The bitterness is very smooth once it warms up a bit; it peaks about 15 - 30 minutes out of the fridge, so I'd leave it out for 5 before drinking. We're planning on brewing this one again, but replacing Cascade with Amarillo as an experiment.