Home Brewing All Grain Brown Ale Beer Recipe

Today we're going to brew a brown ale. Yep. It's going to be an homage to two of our favorite beers, Columbus Nut Brown and Face Down Brown. We're going to call it Face Down Nut Brown. Kind of modeled the recipe after Moose Troll. Right. They had a lot of good information on their website. I'm really excited for it. So we're brewing a brown ale. What's a brown ale? We'll talk about that here in a second. While we're talking about it, we're going to drink a brown ale. This is the Highwire Brewing. I think it's based out of Asheville, North Carolina. A bed of nails brown ale. They're saying a dry finish allows the flavor of toffee and dark fruit to shine through. This is a 6.1% Where are we going to be? Right around a little under 5, probably. Well, cheers to beers. Yeah, cheers. Brown ale. Okay, what's a brown ale? Style guidelines for brown ale. It's drawn out of the Designing Great Beer book. Original gravity, 1040 to 1055. IBUs, 15 to 35. Higher for American versions of brown ales. SRM, our color. It's 8 to 50. That's a huge scale. Yeah. ABV, 4 to 5.5. What's a 6.1? We're asked by an American. I guess, yeah. So is that the British? This is just like standard, average, run-of-the-mill. You know, there's English brown. There's mild brown. There's American brown. Yeah. Cow brown. Ha! What? Brown ales, historically, I think they called anything brown that was brown. Bridging the gap between your standard ale and a foreigner style. That's foreigner style, yeah. It's kind of in between, I guess. I really like brown ales. So, grains. What do we have? Pale Malt. Yep. A little bit of Crystal 60, Crystal 80, Chocolate Malt, Black Patten. Sweet. We'll have the full ingredient list on the website. Oh, big announcement. Big announcement. Big reveal right here. Buckets. We sell buckets now. We're in the bucket business. I never thought that I'd be able to say I'm in the bucket game. Nope. We're in the bucket game. Yeah, so those will be on our website. Huge mess. This is like one of those dog food containers. It is, yeah. Exactly what it said on Amazon was dog food. Yeah, sealable dog food containers, which keeps your grains nice and fresh. So, that was all of our base malt. As you can see, it's quite a bit. Like, it's maybe here in the bucket. These are our specialty malts. Yep. Just look at them grains. Ooh. Really nice. Look at them grains. Tell you what. That is nice. You know how I can tell? Nothing's leaked out of it. It's doing its job perfectly. Hell of a bucket. I don't know if we've shown, like, our grain crush at all. Should we show the grain crush? Probably. Let's scoop some out with a bowl. Let's show you how he crushes. Yeah, so I have our gap set pretty tight on our mill. Like, really tight on a credit card, which is what I usually use. Tight on a credit card. So, that's kind of the gap setting we use. My credit card's probably not going to work ever again. You know, if you're in the bag, you're going to get a little bit better efficiency by doing either a double crush. I just tend to do a single crush, but pretty fine. You can see that there's a little bit of flour. I've got a few questions about that, so I figured I'd show the crush that we're using. You can also, if you buy your grains at a homebrew store, you can have them double crushing for you. Most places are pretty cool with that because they don't usually want to adjust their gap. So, if you do it twice, you'll get a pretty fine crush, too. All right. Time to add the grains. Get the old mesh in there. I'm feeling this is going to smell really good. Smell really good? Yeah. More of the grains in the water. Am I missing? Yeah. I'm too short. There you go. Man, it's hard. All right. So, we're going to mash. Do you want to mash at 152 or 154? Well, I set it for 152. All right. We're at 152 then, guys. We're hoping it will make it a little drier and not quite as sweet. Yeah. I'm not a huge, huge fan of super sweet beers. It kind of fits this style, but if we can get it just a little bit drier, I'll be happy with that. Right. So, do you want to kick on the pump with that Inkbird controller? Let's talk about this. All right. So, we're using the Clawhammer version 1.5 brewing system to make this beer, which utilizes the Inkbird controller with a modification. We've sort of retired our original controller. We're moving on to version 2.0 of our controller. We're just wrapping up the design right now. That's actually available for pre-order on Kickstarter or on our website depending on when you watch this video. Also, right now, the version 1.5 is live. If you already have a controller and you just want our system, you can buy everything but the controller as well. So, a lot of options. Get out there and brew yourself a beer. Yeah. Cool. And buckets? Smells good already. Oh, yeah. That's looking really good. All righty. Our 60-minute mash is done. We're done-zo. Time to lift the clippy. Who wants to lift? I'll lift, I guess. Yes. You lifted the last few. Yes. Not that it's hard. So, we're going to turn the pump off. Turn the element on. Yeah, we'll leave the element on. Oh, goodness. Got a squirter here. All right, man. Are you ready? I am ready, sir. This display of raw strength. Let's see it. Come on, squirt. There we go. Do I squirt? Um, just like hair. Two drops. No, dude. Come on. That was from something else. Let this do its thing. Yeah. Drain on it. Some folks love to squeeze like every last inch of water out. We just let it drain for like five, ten minutes and it's pretty good and dry. So, I hope that works for us. What we're going to do, we're going to bump the temp up on this thing. Yeah, I just bumped it up. Oh, you bumped it up. What did you do? I bumped it to 252. How did you do that? Because I just wanted to. If you go to up. Oh. And then. You just select the number. Yeah, so it was at 152. I'm lazy, so I just put it to 252. Okay, sure. Which is above boiling. Yeah, essentially just like 100% of power. Yeah. All right, this guy's been draining for ten minutes. It's pretty darn dry. So, let's go. I like to give it a side tilt. Side tilt, man. You're a pro. And then put it here. You get a little bit more dripping, but not much. And then take the hooks out. Simple enough. Got a pre-boiled gravity sitting over there chilling down. And what I like to do is put our hot basket in. It's a good spacer while I'm bringing it up to a boil. Actually, while I boil. And then put the lid on. That way you get a little bit of space. The steam can escape. We don't have issues with DMS or anything like that. Our beers come out great. Yeah, the naysayers, the haters. Haters are going to hate. This is going to ruin your beer. But in our experience, and we've brewed lots of beers. Yeah, come by and have one. Actually, don't. You're not invited. So we're going to come back once this comes up to a boil and start our hop additions. See you in a few. That was a terrible spin. That was not the best spin. I've seen better spins. Yeah, that was awful. 1044. We put a thermometer. Took a reading at 75. So I just put it into a calculator. Our hydrometer is calibrated for 60 degrees Fahrenheit. So I did the conversion. And our pre-boil is 1046 after the conversion. All right. We are up to a boil. So our 60-minute boil has just begun. And we're going to add our first hop addition. And we're going to do 0.6 ounces of East Kent Golding. So there's our 0.6 ounces of East Kent Golding for our 60-minute addition. And I'll set the timer for 30 minutes. We'll come back and do our next addition. 30-minute addition. We're going to do 0.8 of an ounce of Willamette. And then there's just one more addition. It's a 15-minute addition. All right. So my alarm just went off for the 15-minute addition. One ounce of Willamette. And then we've got a Werthlock tablet. So we're just going to add both of those. And then you can see we have our plate chiller hooked up. And we're going to just recirculate the wort through the plate chiller for the last 15 minutes. And that will sterilize the plate chiller just to make sure, you know, everything is good to go for fermentation. And to pump in the hoses. Yeah, through everything. Yeah, absolutely. Boil done. Boil's done. Yeah, so 60 minutes is up. And we're going to go ahead and turn the cooling water on. We're just going to recirculate through the kettle. And then we'll monitor temperature on this. Exactly. There's no on-off switch on the Inkbirds. So you can't just turn the element off. For the element, yeah. Yeah, so we're going to just turn the temperature to zero. That should solve that problem. We're going to change the way we cool the beer and put it into the carboy. Depending on the size of the chiller that you're using and the temperature of your groundwater, which is oftentimes dependent on the time of year, your location, et cetera, you may have to circulate wort through the chiller more than one pass to get it down to the 65, 70, whatever temp you're shooting for. What we've been doing here recently is circulating wort through the chiller back into the kettle, and we're using the controller to monitor the temp of the wort. Once we get down to the ideal pitching temp, in this case it's going to be, what, 65? Yeah, I think 65 will be good. We'll just turn the chiller off, actually, because the whole thing's cooled down to 65, and then we'll pop it over into the fermenter. If you have a larger chiller or you have cooler groundwater, you can install a little adapter on the output of the chiller, which is available for sale on our site if you want one of those. We used to sell those with the kits. We priced them accordingly. We've now backed that out, and here it is. We're making it just an option. Anyway, we're not going to use this in this. This doesn't come with the current version of the kit. If you want it, like I said, you can get it. It will save you a little bit of time, and it is useful in certain situations. We're not using it today. You use a fair amount of water while you're chilling. There are several options. You could, if you're brewing outside, run this in your garden, water some plants, water your yard, or whatever. What I'm doing is I'm running it into our fermentation bucket. You do need to sanitize your buckets and everything you're using for fermenting and all that stuff. I'm going to make up a five-gallon batch of sanitizer solution, and I'm going to use the water that we're outputting from the chiller to do that, just to be more efficient with the way we use the water. We're going to do an ounce for five gallons, right? Yes. Got an ounce? Yes. Cool. Bucket's down here. Now we've got some blue-looking water. Yeah. Perfect. Cool. We'll stir that up. Airlock parts. What else do we need to sanitize? Anything? I like to sanitize the lid grommet. If you're using a bucket and you have a lid grommet, toss that guy in there. Other than that, I think we're pretty well sanitized. Oh, yeah. These are freshy buckets, man. You've got to break the seal. Break the seal. These buckets are not for weaklings. Nope. Or amateurs. Once you get the first course started, it makes it easy. There you go. These make a really nice seal. They've got a nice gasket in it. Can you, like, push it down in there? Will it go? Oh, yeah. There you go. Give it the old one-two right there. A little dunkaroo. Look at that flex on that bucket. Man, that's just some flex. That's some bucket flex right there. That's what you want to see. Trust me. I know. I sell buckets. Cool, man. Business papers. Papers? Business papers. Yeast. Put that in some sanitizer. Bucket's been sanitized. Scissors. Need to be sanitized. Scissors in the sanitizer. All right. So we chilled the kettle. We're at 64.6. I have the fermenter set to 66. It'll warm up a little bit as active fermentation starts. So we'll give it the old transfer. Step one, turn the pump off. Step two, turn the pump on. Yep. All right. Blast away. Oh, look at that. It's got a nice color. Nice and brown. I think what we're after, brown. Imagine that. Zip out of there. Perfect. What's left we'll use for our hydrometer sample. That's usually what we leave. You don't want to... I mean, it's pretty clean with the hot basket. There's not a whole lot of tube down there. I would recommend waiting until at least your 23rd day before you try this pro move. That was pretty good, man. I mean... I didn't figure that was going to spell. Not bad. Oh, and it's even floating. Perfect. So our sample is at 65, 66 probably. Yeah. And our hydrometer is calibrated for 60. Give that guy a little spinny spin. And we'll see where it lands. Hoping for 1050, 1052 is my goal, pal. Man, it's looking 1052 to me. I'm going to call it 1051. Yeah, it's definitely going to get 1051. 1051. On the hydrometer before temp correction. We're at 1051. If it's 67 degrees, it jumps up to 1052. So 1051 and a half. Yeah. We'll just call it 1051. We'll call it 1051. Yeah. And I'm happy with that. Yeah. That's what I was looking for, so... All right, cool. Okay, before we add the yeast to this, we're going to need to aerate it. All right, we're going to add the lid and then aerate it, and then we'll add our yeast. With these lids, just get it started, and then you can just work it around. And... There you go. They make a super tight seal, which is nice as a gasket. You pretty much need... That's why I'm wanting a bucket. It is. You need a bucket removal tool to get these lids off. Pretty much without any fermentation bucket. We're just going to aerate this the old-fashioned way. And then just give it the old... Shake it through. Yeah. So 60 seconds is really all you need. Yeah. Before we get to our testing we've done. Just pretend like you're rocking... You're dancing with somebody. As if you don't know how to dance. Oh, crap. Went a little deep. Whoa. Went a little deep. What is going on? Went a little deep. Sometimes I go too shallow. Cool. Very cool. All right. So we got our grommet. Got the lid back on here. Put the grommet in there. Oh, yeah. Pros here. You know what? Sometimes a three-day goes well. No spills. And I'm just going to tape our temperature probe to the bucket. If you don't have a fancy refrigerator set up, just put it in the area of the house that's going to... Cool, dark room. Yeah. Cool, dark. It'll be fine. 65 degrees. Perfect. Yeah. I expect this time of year. Oh, yeah. Look at that. Over here. Look at that bucket. Just look at that. Well, would you look at that? Look at that. What do you think, man? I think this is going to be really good. Yeah. I'm really excited. I'm interested to see how the California ALU does with it. Yeah, man. All right. Nice. Nice job. Until next time. Subscribe. Hit like. Tell your mom. Tell your mom I said hi. Tell your moms. Tell them what we're doing.