Gyle 38 - Sunny Garden Pale

I’m not generally arsed with low ABV beers, there’s so many shite sub 5% beers around, and I’ve had very little luck the 6 times I’ve tried to go below 5%. So I generally set the lower limit at 5%.  All that’s changed with all these lower ABV beers that have the body and taste of a higher ABV beer. A little hoppy gnome zombie if you will.

After finally getting my brewing kit back up and running, I really wanted to brew a low (to me) ABV beer that would be perfect for the summer.  I’ve done some investigations and came to the conclusion that one of the main problems was that I mash at a relatively low temperature, which leaves the beer quite thin, and with not much residual sweetness to hold up the hops.

To address that, and as a test to see if I can produce a beer that’s sub 5%, I performed a brew yesterday that is now happily bubbling away in the front room.

I started out with a fairly simple grist bill, as seen here.

Standard base of Marris Otter, bought from The Malt Miller, and then some crystal malts for various attributes they bring. I generally use carapils in everything as it’s good for head retention, and a touch of body, the Munich brings more body with it, and helps fill out flavour and mouthfeel. This is finished off with a dash of the CaraMunich which brings a dash of colour to the mix, and even more delicious toffee to the table.

I decided to up the mash temperature to 69ºC to see how that would affect the finished beer. The theory is that the higher mash temperature will result in more unfermentable sugars, meaning more residual sweetness in the beer. Hopefully this will mean that it ends up with the body of a higher ABV beer able to balance more hops, without the alcohol.

The mash was at a ratio of 2.5:1 Litres per KG, which required 11 litres, and then sparging with 28 litres. The water treatment for this brew was as follows;

I do a single temperature mash, and then “sparge” at a higher temperature. It seems to work well for me. I may look at other mashing methods at some point.

Now that I've got a separate mash tun and kettle, I could start heating up the wort whilst the rest of the wort was coming out of the mash tun. This was the first brew in a long time where I didn't add a healthy dose of husks to stop the mash sticking. All was going well until the last few litres, when it stuck solid. I ended up having to empty out  the mash tun (by pouring it all into an FV bucket), cleaning out the manifold, and then remashing in with husks. I then just ran off and recirculated over and over again until the wort was mostly clear. This wasn’t causing any real delay as the bulk of the wort was already in the kettle.

Another departure from my normal brewing routine, I didn’t bitter with Magnum. Only time will tell if this was a bad idea or not. I decided to only use Apollo and Galaxy whole hop in the boil, and not very much at that. I decided not to put the flameout hops in at flameout, rather I ran off 5 litres of wort through the counterflow wort chiller, and then added it back to the kettle. This dropped the temp to just over 82ºC, so I ran off another 1 litre and got a temp in the kettle of  80ºC. At this temp I dropped in the bulk of the hops, and then let it sit for 20 minutes.

Following the hopstand (well, that’s what the cool kids are calling it) I ran the rest off through the chiller and pitched in a starter of Brettanomyces Bruxellensis (I can’t go changing everything all at once, I need some stability).

I was aiming for 75% system efficiency, and ended up with 82% mash efficiency, and 76% total efficiency, so that’s pretty good. I got 26 litres of wort with an original gravity of 1.040. This beer is going to be finished off with a dry hopping of both Pacific Gem and Summit hop pellets. I’m hoping that this is a delicious, and quaffable beer to drink whilst sat in the garden, only time will tell.

In the hiatus from brewing, other than finishing off a degree in mechanical engineering, I’ve also revised my brewing spreadsheet to make it easier to follow, with colour coding, notes, and tips. I like that it gives an indication on the expected mash gravity, and I’ve added in colour as well. I also built a new kettle (using the old one) and made a different hop filter as the mash manifold kept clogging over the past few brews with all the proteins coagulating during the hot break. It worked a charm.

Edit - 09/07/2014

I checked the beer today and it's down to 1.005, even with the higher mash temperature. This is mainly due to my using Brettanomyces Bruxellensis. I tried a little and the malt flavours had dropped somewhat and were allowing the sweeter fruits of the hops to come through. The flavour of the malt dominating is a problem I have with quite a few low ABV beers, so this was welcome. I transferred off the yeast cake so I could wash that for reuse, and I dry hopped with 100g of both Summit and Pacific Gem. This should be a lovely fruity beer for the end of August. Let's see how it goes.