Síofra Red Ale

organised chaos

In a radical departure to my usual beer interests, this weekend I brewed a version of Jamil Zainasheff's Evil Twin. This is the beer he wrote about several years ago in the American Homebrewer's Association "Zymurgy" magazine, reprinted here on his own website. It introduces the concept of hop bursting - forgoing an early hop addition in favour of pushing all hop additions to the last 20 minutes. I've been intrigued by this ever since I first read about it, but I held off trying it out until I got to try a Heretic Evil Twin last week. A local distributor is now cold shipping several American beers to Australia, Evil twin being one. The hop character is incredibly complex, and is beautifully balanced by a heavy malt backbone. I've read here that Heretic is using a different malt bill and hop bill for their Evil Twin compared to the version on Jamil's website, though the principle remains the same.

I'll be trying to get close to the Heretic Evil Twin. If I could criticize anything about Jamil's recipes, it's that his malt bills seem far too busy to me, with the Zymurgy Evil Twin being a good example. The Heretic Evil Twin malt bill he describes in the link above is much more to my liking, with a simple pale ale background providing a platform for a huge amount of good quality medium crystal malt. A little roasted barley is added for colour. Jamil suggest a half sack of RB in a 30bbl batch, which seems to come out at about 80g for a 22.5 litre batch. Actually this ends up being quite dark according to ProMash, so I'll scale it back to around 40g.

I am a little worried to be using 12% crystal, but I guess with that level of hopping you need to go a little crazy. The hopping itself consists of very generous amounts of citra and columbus. I got about 250g of citra in a mucked up hop order about a year back, and they have been carefully stored since then awaiting a suitable brew, so I'm glad to be able to use a hundred or so grams at long last. I also got some columbus in that order, but I decided that they are past their best so I bought an 80g packet from my LHBS - you will notice that I use all 80g in this brew. A small charge is added at 20mins, then a big one at 10 and at flameout. Jamil says that Heretic Evil Twin is dry hopped, and I'm planning to dry hop mine too. I'll wait until fermentation is complete and then I'll do a taste test to determine the actual amounts, but the recipe below has what I'm expecting to use.

I mentioned a huge old keg I got a while back from Ebay, well recently I swapped it for a regular 50L keg. I decided that I'm unlikely to want to do double batches for a while yet, and the 50L keg is a bit more realistic in size for my operation.

For this brew I moved away from 'brew in a bag' and actually mashed into about 17L of liqour, and fly sparged another 17 or so to get to my pre-boil volume. The mash itself was multi-step, 65C for 40 minutes, 72C for 20, and finally a mash out at 78 for 10 minutes before sparging with 78 degree water. I collected about 27 litres and boiled down to 23.5 (allowing a little extra wort to account for extra loss to hop debris). I'll write more on the system in another month or two when I get it dialed in right, this brew was a bit of an experiment.

I pitched the yeast from a big stirred starter of Pacman - recovered from the Beamish clone I recently did. It's at 17C in the fermenting fridge, and fermentation is extremely vigorous. This morning it was bursting out the top and the hop aroma was pretty incredible, which can only be a good sign for the finished product.

Here's the recipe:

Siofra Red Ale

A ProMash Recipe Report

Recipe Specifics
----------------

Batch Size (L):          23.50    Wort Size (L):     23.50
Total Grain (kg):         6.43
Anticipated OG:          1.063    Plato:             15.39
Anticipated EBC:          33.6
Anticipated IBU:          28.5
Brewhouse Efficiency:       75 %
Wort Boil Time:             60    Minutes

Grain/Extract/Sugar

   %     Amount     Name                   Origin   Potential EBC
-----------------------------------------------------------------
 87.6     5.63 kg.  Pale Ale Malt (2-row)  Australia  1.037     5
 11.8     0.76 kg.  Crystal 77L                   UK  1.035   148
  0.6     0.04 kg.  Roasted Barley (Simpson's)    UK  1.029  1350

Potential represented as SG per pound per gallon.


Hops

   Amount     Name                              Form    Alpha  IBU  Boil Time
---------------------------------------------------------------
  9.00 g.     Citra                 Pellet  13.40   5.1  20 min.
  8.00 g.     Columbus              Pellet  15.20   5.4  20 min.
 25.00 g.     Citra                 Pellet  13.40   8.5  10 min.
 24.00 g.     Columbus              Pellet  15.20   9.6  10 min.
 28.00 g.     Citra                 Pellet  13.40   0.0  0 min.
 25.00 g.     Columbus              Pellet  15.20   0.0  0 min.
 28.00 g.     Citra                 Pellet  13.40   0.0  Dry Hop
 23.00 g.     Columbus              Pellet  15.20   0.0  Dry Hop


Yeast
-----

WYeast 1764 Rogue PacMan (VSS)


Water Profile
-------------

Profile:           Pale Ale
Profile known for:

Calcium(Ca):          71.0 ppm
Magnesium(Mg):        10.0 ppm
Sodium(Na):           13.0 ppm
Sulfate(SO4):        116.0 ppm
Chloride(Cl):         79.0 ppm
biCarbonate(HCO3):    30.0 ppm

pH: 7.30


Mash Schedule
-------------

Saccharification Rest Temp :  65  Time:  40
Mash-out Rest Temp :          72  Time:  20
Sparge Temp :                 78  Time:  10

All temperature measurements are degrees Celsius.