It’s been a while since brewing, too long – 3 weeks now, so I couldn’t resist. I had some ingredients at home, so decided to try and make my Black Ale in a new extract based process. I wanted to implement the idea I got from James Spencer (from Basic Brewing) about short wort cooking time that I used on the Cranberry Ale on my Black Ale. The short wort time is based on the fact that an extract is actually a reduced wort, and been through the boiling process, so doesn’t really needs 60 minutes boil. I decided to give it a go and that resulted in an hour and forty minutes brewing day – from the first ingredient out to the last clean tool back to the box – not bad at all!
The day was very simple:
1.5kg tin of Coopers Dark Ale, boiled with 4.4 litres of Brita filtered water.
0 minutes – 35 grams of Fuggles hops (3.48%)
15minutes – 30 gra
ms of the same hops
30 minutes – into the ice bath
At the same time (from minute 0) – yeast culture of 12g Notingham yeast (Gluten-Free, Danstar) with 13g dextrose in 500ml Brita water at 32°c.
In the fermentation bucket – 7 litres of cold Brita water (19°c)
After 26 minutes in the ice bath the wort reached 27°c and was passed through a sieve into the fermenter. The yeast and another 500ml of Brita water was added.
All together 12.5 litres, at 22°c (my fermenting “room” = washing machine cupboard, is pretty warm) with OG=1040.
Great results, and I plan on splitting this batch next weekend and use 2 different hops for the dry hopping.
This is such a great way to have a quick brewing day when all you want is to play with beer making and flavours, especially after my BIAB saga.
