Amarillo Pale

With the coming hop shortage, I figured I would take advantage of the hops we have in our local shop now and not wait until they were totally gone. I am not sure what the availability of Amarillo hops is going to be, but I love them so much I decided I would make a beer using only them in case they did disappear. The recipe is amazingly simple, and I have to admit that I stole most of it from The Homebrew Chef, Sean Paxton. His recipe was all grain so I converted that, and am going to dry hop where he didn't, but those are really the only changes I made.

My starting gravity was about 1.063, and the sample I took was totally green from the hops. I made a 2 L starter a day before and this picture was taken just before it really took off. The smell and the taste of the wort were amazing. Just all hops and nothing else. I may have fudged some of the amounts and numbers just a little bit as I brewed this at a group brew and was having a great time socializing. For the most part the amounts though should be pretty close to accurate.

Recipe

8.5 pounds pale DME
.5 pounds cara pils
7 ounces Amarillo(9% AAU) for 10 min.
White Labs 001 Cal Ale (2 liter starter)

Steep Grains for 30 min at 150 to 155
60 min. boil
Fermenting in glass at 68 degrees

Six Pack IPA

This is the six pack IPA from James Spencer at Basic Brewing Radio. I used the recipe that was published in BYO magazine. I was just bored one night and wanted to brew but didn't want to drag out all of the equipment when I remembered this recipe. Everything went really well and it was pretty easy to make. The only real problem I ran into was that Pro Mash did not like working with volumes less than a gallon. Also, since I do not own a refractometer, the actual gravity and IBU numbers are completely unknown to me. I can make a guess based on volume, but to tweak this recipe it looks like I am going to have to work purely on taste.

I know that the background looks pretty ghetto, but that is because I am fermenting in my basement where it is cool. At the time of this posting it had just started to ferment, and I am hoping that it will really take off today.

The recipe was pretty basic, one thing you really need is a good scale as the hop additions are all measured in gram increments. I went to the local head shop and picked up one of those little scales that hang off of your finger. It worked OK, but a nice digital Escali scale would have been a lot nicer.

So here is the recipe I used:

2 oz. Crystal Malt 60L
1 Lb Light DME
10 g. Simcoe Hop Pellets 15 min.
4 g. Simcoe Hop Pellets 5 min.
4 g. Simcoe Hop Pellets 0 min.
5 g. Safale US - 05 Dry Yeast
4 g. Simcoe Hop Pellets -- I will dry hop in about a week for 3 days.

I started with one gallon of water, and then just did it like normal except that everything was way smaller. The whole article is in the July-August 07 BYO and it goes into a lot more detail on the actual process.