Brew Day - Front Porch Summer Ale

I don't know about anyone else, but when it comes to Summer brews, I look forward to something cold, crisp, refreshing, and session-able (being able to have more than one at a sitting).  With that in mind I still wanted to brew an Ale, but one that was lighter, and close to a Lager but without the long lagering times involved (although I have had some limited success with a short lager method that only takes 2 weeks-maybe that one should be saved for a future update).  

Once again, I was off to the recipe section of Homebrewtalk.com to find some inspiration.  After looking at all of the excellent recipes that other home brewers have listed, I came up with my own partial mash version that looks like this:

Front Porch Summer Ale

Partial Mash Recipe

2 lbs light DME

5 lbs American Vienna 

2 lbs American Pilsner

1/2 lbs rice hulls

.75 oz Perle hop pellets (6.9% AA) at 60 min

.50 Tettnanger hop pellets (2.4% AA) at 45 min

.50 ounces Tettnanger hop pellets (2.4% AA) at flameout

Safeale US-05 yeast, re-hydrated
Irish Moss

According to my brewing software, it should come out close to:

1.049 OG,      1.009 FG      5.31% ABV     19.79 IBU's       4.95 SRM

In actuality I ended up with:

1.054 OG       1.012 FG    which is not too far off course

I would like to thank Yooper for posting her recipe of Fizzy Yellow Beer, which is where I got the inspiration for my version.  For those of you who would like to see the original recipe, please visit this link:

http://www.homebrewtalk.com/showthread.php?t=120939

With that being said, here's how the brew day went

I always start the same way, everything gets laid out in the kitchen and compared to the recipe to make sure I haven't missed anything.  I do this because on my very first brew I bought a kit, and didn't check the contents.  The included yeast package just happened to be missing out of the one I bought and I had to drive back to the LHBS to get another.

As this is a partial mash recipe, I put the grains into the Corona mill and ground them to the size that I like prior to putting them into the mash tun. This one had 7 pounds of grain to grind up and it took about 15 minutes to grind by hand.  The following weekend I altered the mill so that I can run it off of my drill.

My mash tun is nothing fancy, just the standard 5 gallon Rubbermaid cooler modified with a ball valve.  As I get closer to all grain brewing, I know I will have to get a bigger one, but for now this is good for what I am doing.  The strike water was 168 degrees, and once mixed with the grains it fell to 152 degrees, which is what I was shooting for, so I left it be for an hour while I messed around with my brew dogs.

This is Diamond and Hunter, my brew dogs - hence the name of my blog as well!

After the 60 minute mash, I fly sparged the tun and everything went into the brew pot.  Roughly 4 gallons went into the pot and as soon as it came to boiling, the first hop addition started, followed by the other 2 as time progressed.  At flameout is when I went with the addition of DME because I wanted to keep the beer as light in color as possible.  I also prefer to use hop bags because I don't like dealing with the hop debris when I bottle. After the 60 minute boil I had roughly 3.25 gallons of wort in the pot.

After cooling to 75 degrees everything was transferred to my fermentation bucket and topped off with cold water, bringing the temp down further to about 65 degrees or so.  I added the rehydrated US-05 at this time and put everything into my fermentation chamber to sit for a while.  My chamber is a take on the Son Of Fermenter that you can find plans for online.  It's fine for one bucket at a time, and I like it because of the small footprint it takes in the basement.

This beer is a rather quick one to ferment.  A secondary isn't truly necessary, but of course if you secondary all of your brews as a manner of habit, feel free to, it can't hurt at all as long as your sanitizing practices are in place.  I did a very simple 2 week primary and bottled after that, using light DME in place of priming sugar.  As a matter of practice I wait 3 weeks after bottling to have a sample and this is what it looks like.

This is a very good beer!  My wife - who is very supportive of my homebrewing hobby - asked if this can be in the permanent lineup of what we keep on hand.  It's crisp, pretty clear after the chill haze disappears, not dry at all, and has enough hops to please my IPA drinking buddies but at the same time, not too much to fend off my BMC drinking buddies.  As far as it goes, I think it is an all around crowd pleaser.