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Recipe Type: All Grain Yeast: Urkel - Imperial Yeast L28 Yeast Starter: Yes-2 liter...............use of a starter & liquid yeast... every time Original Gravity: 1.049 Final Gravity: 1.010 IBU: 34 Boiling Time (Minutes): 90 ABV: 5.12% Color: 2.7 Primary Fermentation: 42 days @ 52* Double check the yeast package to confirm temperature Aged: Kegged, chilled, and Carb'd for one week = 7 days @ 39* Hopping schedules are still based on a 7.5 gallon boil, with 6 gallons at the end of the boil, 5.5 gallons going into the fermenter, and 5 gallons going into the bottles or keg. The bottom line to brewing great beer is to use the freshest ingredients possible. Now I always forget some steps. It's important to remain consistent without errors so you can compare 1 batch to another. * Don't forget to add the Coil Chiller to the boil with 15 minutes left. * Whilfloc tablet or Irish Moss added with 15 minutes left in the boil. * Add oxigen to the cooled wort - 80*-, (stir), & before adding the yeast. We get our water from Folsom Lake, then it is purified by a water treatment plant. Our base profile here in Roseville is very soft. Perfect for Pilsners. Ca = 9.4 = Calcium Mg = 1.4 = Magnesium Na = 3.5 = Sodium SO4 = 4.4 = Sulfate CL = 2.8 = Chloride HCO3 = 34 = Bicarbonate

Notes

It's crisp, light, and tasty. Let's brew a simple a simple Czech Pilsner that's crushable and a great beer to have on a nice warm, hot, and sunny day. https://youtu.be/h0pVrkEmvEI The key in making the recipe is in obtaining the freshest ingredients you can get. Source the yeast before driving. Morebeer (www.morebeer.com) has it. Per Drew Beechum: Drew Beechum has been brewing and writing about brewing since he first picked up a kettle in 1999. He is the author of The Everything Homebrewing Book, The Everything Hard Cider Book, and The Homebrewer's Journal, and coauthor of Experimental Homebrewing. Per BREW magazine: If you're brewing all-grain, you definitely want to adjust the mash temperature to match the desired body of your beer. Mashing at a higher temperature like 156*F will result in a more malty beer and an increase in body and final gravity. Mashing at a low temperature, 148*F, results in a cleaner, drier finish to the beer with a lower final gravity. When brewing all grain recipes a lower mash temperature produces wort that ferments into a thinner bodied higher alcohol beer and a higher temperature mash produces wort that ferments into fuller bodied sweeter tasting beer. In my fourth year of home brewing I dove into brewing water properties and discovered how they influence the fermentation characteristics of wort. I also learned how brewing water properties can easily be adjusted to significantly improve the flavor, taste, color and quality of all my beers. Who knew? Narrowing the target mash pH to 5.3-5.5 will help to optimize the enzymes, and also enhance flavor. A higher pH will increase harshness in the finished beer, extracting more tannins and also increase the isomerization of hop oils so that the beer can come across as rough or coarse. To check the pH, a very small sample (even a shot glass size) can be taken from the mash, cooled in an ice/water bath, and then checked when the sample is at 68-75 degrees. PH readings vary from mash temperatures to room temperatures, and any pH readings are always provided at room temperature. You can further improve the taste of your beer by increasing its malt flavor, while offsetting harsh bitterness, by adding a little Calcium Chloride and Epsom Salt to the same filtered, chlorine and chloride free water. I think of brewing water as a way to brighten the color and taste of my beer, in much the same way a treble control is used to increase the brightness of music during playback. It is true that water with high sulfate content enhances the sharp, bitter aspect of the hops, it's easily overdone. The result can be a chalky, metallic, or harsh character. When brewing, you also can’t “erase” too much gypsum by adding more calcium chloride. If you have soft water, add some Gypsum or Burton Salts, but start low, targeting half the amount of sulfate typical of Burton water. Calcium carbonate (chalk) has been used routinely in brewing, but because of its limited solubility, it does not dissolve well in the mash unless extraneous measures are taken, and should be avoided. It takes all the guesswork out of adjusting your water properties while keeping your additions within safe recommended ranges. There is a whole lot more to water chemistry, but you can begin to get your feet wet using just a few little tweaks and produce some really great beers. Most homebrews benefit from a simple addition of Gypsum & Calcium Cloride. This makes the hops pop! Adding anything else simply makes the beer taste more medicine like. For beers that have a lovely malt flavor, calcium chloride is a common addition. Looking at the list again, you can see that calcium chloride will provide calcium to the mash as well as the chloride. Since chloride enhances the fullness or “roundness” of malt flavor, and gives a perception of sweetness to the malt, adding it to a beer recipe can bring the flavor to the next level. If you’re making an Octoberfest or brown ale, adding some calcium chloride would be a great move. Adding 3 grams to a 5 gallon batch of brown ale maybe be just the ticket to making a very good beer great. A helpful comparison to brewing salts may be seasoning salts in cooking. Just as making chicken soup with a great recipe and fresh ingredients can be improved with a bit of salt or some bay leaf, a great beer base can be improved with a bit of tweaking of brewing salts. Too much salt in the chicken broth can ruin the soup, however; and too much of a brewing salt can ruin the beer. Using more conservative additions with the “less is more” idea is a great way to approach adding brewing salts to your homebrewing repertoire. You don’t want a “minerally” or harsh beer in the end after all your hard work! Another pitfall is to be so consumed with the numbers of the ions is to forget that the mash pH is the most important aspect of delving into water chemistry. An appropriate mash pH will provide the most benefit to your beer, while the flavor ions are the “seasonings” in your beer. Starting with a good recipe and using good water and targeting an optimum mash pH will make a very good beer. Tweaking the recipe by adding some gypsum and calcium chloride (as examples) may take that very good beer to very, very good or even excellent beer. To compare brewing to cooking again, adding the perfect amount of salt and pepper to your spaghetti sauce can make your very good sauce something memorable, and adding a bit of rosemary may make it exceptional. So it goes with brewing- starting with a great base and adding your brewing salts in the right amounts can take it to the next level. Adding too much is more of a danger than too little, so be aware of that in your additions as you start adjusting your water. Also, choosing which hops to use in a recipe is a lot simpler than choosing your grain bill. The overall amount of variation in flavor in hops is much less than in grains. When choosing hop varieties for established beer styles, review existing recipes and remember that, in general, classic beer styles are hopped with varieties from their country of origin. In other words, English beer uses English hops. German beers use German hops and so on. I judge the health of yeast by how quickly it ferments. To give your yeast every opportunity to thrive, always make a starter to maximize cell counts, increase your yeast's viability and achieve vigorous fermentation. Professionally, I like to see fermentation complete within four to six days for ale. As a homebrewer, you can shorten your fermentation timeline and create better beer with the use of a starter... every time. Tips To Optimize Dry Hop AromaPosted on HBT, May 22nd 2015 | By: Andrew J. Kazanovicz 1 - Use pellets 2 - Consider multiple varieties Much like salt and pepper, dry hop varietals often work best in tandem. Whether it's Simcoe and Amarillo, Citra and Centennial, Chinook and Cascade, or Nelson Sauvin and Columbus, dry hopping with two or more hop varieties can help create greater depth in your beers. But be careful not to overdo it! In fact, you may find you can detract from a desirable characteristic of one hop if overwhelmed with another. The key is finding the right balance 3 - Use multistage additions I have noticed a difference between beers I have dry hopped in one verses two (and even three!) stages. YMMV. 4 - Utilize warmer temperatures 5 - Optimize contact time Wolfe found that most commercial dry hopping regimens last anywhere between three days to one week, sometimes extending upwards of one month! Steele recommends limiting dry hopping to 5-15 days. Conversely, Brynildson does not exceed three days with any dry hop addition. Keep in mind many commercial breweries have the ability to rouse the hops, keeping them in suspension via hop cannon or torpedo-like devices. Unroused pellets will only achieve 3/4 of the overall aroma intensity as roused ones, peaking at four days 6 - Start in primary 7 - Minimize oxygen uptake when transfering beer from primary to secondary. As any experienced brewer knows, minimizing oxygen uptake post-fermentation is critical. For hop-forward beers it is essential! No matter how good your technique, the most common area where oxygen uptake is introduced is during racking. Reducing the total number of vessels (secondary fermenter, keg, and bottles) the beer matures in is one easy way to reduce oxygen uptake. Even better is purging all your racking equipment and vessels with a liberal amount of CO2 before transfer. 8 - Utilize late hopping/whirlpooling Research conducted in the late 2000's by Rock Bottom's Van Havig revealed that late hopping/whirlpooling may be more effective at achieving high levels of hop aroma than dry hopping. First, his data demonstrated that longer post-boil hop residence (whirlpool) resulted in more hop flavor, aroma, and perceived bitterness than shorter residence. Second, longer post boil residence resulted in more hop flavor than dry hopping alone; therefore hop flavor is best developed in the kettle. Lastly and perhaps most importantly, was the combination of late hopping and dry hopping resulted in greater aroma than dry hopping alone. 9 - Understand the law of diminishing returns Dry hop aroma doesn't increase exponentially with the addition of greater amounts of dry hops. In fact, Havig also demonstrated that brewers can reach a point of diminishing return with dry hops. Many commercial breweries report a dry hopping rate between 0.25-1.5 oz/gal (0.5-3 lb/bbl) with breweries such as Stone, Lagunitas, and New Belgium at the higher end of the spectrum, averaging to 0.5 oz/gal (1 lb/bbl). This is a good place to start, but I find best results at 1.5 oz/gal for my hoppy IPAs. Per HBT: For lagers, pitch your yeast cold (mid 40s to low 50s[F]) for better flavor. After the growth phase, raise the temperature incrementally.Ensure you have consistent pitching practices. Pitch the same amount of yeast at the same temperature each time you brew so you will have a good baseline. From there, you can experiment to find what works and doesn't work for you. If you don't have access to a fridge for temperature control, putting a wet T-shirt over your carboy generally does a very good job at keeping the temp between 66-70[F]. This trick has saved my beers a number of times! Just wet the T-shirt down each day to make sure it stays cool. Also, ramping up fermentation temperature with a heat belt such as the Brew Belt or FermWrap when fermenting saisons makes a world of difference with regard to ester complexity. Whether heating or cooling, temp control can make or break an otherwise great recipe, so try to either brew with the seasons or control fermentation temperature in some way. A reptile heat pad is a great heat source if you are running a dual-stage controller or need to ferment at higher temperature than ambient. These heat pads are readily available, inexpensive, and work well for providing the small amounts of heat needed in an insulated environment like a chest freezer or fermentation chamber. For the cost and space-conscious brewer, secure a large bucket and place your fermenting vessel inside. Pour water into the bucket. The water surrounding your fermenter will drop the beer's temperature by three or four degrees [Fahrenheit] from ambient and minimize temperature fluctuations. If you want to lower the beer's temperature by up to eight degrees, freeze water in ziplock bags and drop them into the water in the bucket; switch out the ice bags every eight hours. The first five days of fermentation are the most crucial for flavor, so don't feel you have to spend two weeks switching out ice bags. Assuming you are not filtering, after fermentation, allow your beer the proper time to cold crash. Although your beer may look finished, there still may be some hop and yeast sediment that can give off unwanted flavors. I recommend at least 6 days. In the past I would rack to a secondary fermentation chamber just to clear my beer. The beer gurus are currently advising against it. Introducing oxigen and increasing the chance of infection are the main reasons why. My own experience has confirmed............ the beer left only in the primary to ferment & age just tastes better. So I cold crash for 6 days when kegging and introducing carbonation. THEN pore your pint = solution.