#22 - Raging Red Ale [All Grain]

I had an Odell's Red Ale recently and while I enjoyed the flavour I didn't enjoy the €7 price tag. I had been contemplating brewing a red ale since making the Ruby Red Ale kit. I knew I couldn't replicate that unique, sweet, hoppy aroma and flavour that is common across most of the Odell's range but I wanted something similar. While searching for a recipe I discovered that they used to brew a beer called "Extra Special Red Ale". I found an all grain recipe (see end of post) for this beer and modified it based on the ingredients which I could find in my local home brew store. 

The fist issue with this recipe is that it doesn't really conform to any BJCP style guide lines. Its really an imperial red ale but that style doesn't exist. I have put it in as an american amber ale due to its deeper red colour but even at that all the other categories are maxed out for the style. An American IPA style might have fitted better perhaps but does it really matter? 

My efficiency has been consistently poor in the 50 to 60% range so I have been adding more grain to account for this. I also forgot that the plumber had replaced my tap in the kitchen so my hose to tap connection, for hooking up the wort chiller, no longer fitted at all. I had to fill my mash tun with water and run that through the chiller instead which was a pain. After nearly an hour of water slowly trickling through the wort chiller, the temperature was down to 28degrees C, being impatient and tried after the brew day I decided to pitch the yeast at this temperature. It was fine and kicked off the next day, it is still in the primary fermenter so I don't know whether I will pay for that impatience later in terms of affects on flavour. 

Recipe: Extra Special Red Ale
Style: American Amber Ale
TYPE: All Grain
Recipe Specifications
--------------------------
Boil Size: 26.21 l
Post Boil Volume: 22.71 l
Batch Size (fermenter): 19.00 l   
Bottling Volume: 17.00 l
Estimated OG: 1.063 SG
Estimated Color: 35.3 EBC
Estimated IBU: 79.9 IBUs
Brewhouse Efficiency: 60.00 %
Est Mash Efficiency: 69.0 %
Boil Time: 75 Minutes
Ingredients:
------------
Amt                   Name                                     Type          #        %/IBU         
3000.00 g             Pale Malt, Maris Otter (5.0 EBC)         Grain         1        46.2 %        
2000.00 g             Munich Malt (14.0 EBC)                   Grain         2        30.8 %        
500.00 g              Caramel/Crystal Malt - 40L (78.8 EBC)    Grain         3        7.7 %         
500.00 g              Caramel/Crystal Malt -120L (200.0 EBC)   Grain         4        7.7 %         
500.00 g              Munich Malt - 10L (22.0 EBC)             Grain         5        7.7 %         
35.00 g               Simcoe [13.00 %] - Boil 60.0 min         Hop           6        46.9 IBUs     
15.00 g               Simcoe [13.00 %] - Boil 45.0 min         Hop           7        18.4 IBUs     
7.00 g                Simcoe [13.00 %] - Boil 30.0 min         Hop           8        7.2 IBUs      
15.00 g               Amarillo Gold [8.50 %] - Boil 10.0 min   Hop           9        4.8 IBUs      
15.00 g               Amarillo Gold [8.50 %] - Boil 5.0 min    Hop           10       2.6 IBUs      
30.00 g               Amarillo Gold [8.50 %] - Boil 0.0 min    Hop           11       0.0 IBUs      
30.00 g               Simcoe [13.00 %] - Boil 0.0 min          Hop           12       0.0 IBUs      
1.0 pkg               California Ale (White Labs #WLP001) [35. Yeast         13       -             
Mash Schedule: Single Infusion, Single Batch Sparge [Shanes AG]
Total Grain Weight: 6500.00 g
----------------------------
Name              Description                  Step Temperature       Step Time       
Mash In           Add 12.11 l of water at 168. 152.0 F                60 min          
Sparge: Batch sparge with 2 steps (Drain mash tun, , 23l) of 168.1 F water

Tweeting Fermenter

After a brew day I cant help but have concern for the status of the fermentation and its environment especially in terms of the temperature. I had always wondered what was going on and thought it would be great if I could get some sort of real time information about what was happening. I decided to put my engineering background to some use and set up a temperature monitoring system. I considered using an Arduino based solution but didn't really have the time and didn't want the mess (It was actually sheer laziness). I went for one of these units in the end:

Wireless Temperature Monitoring Units

This unit connects to the PC via USB which performs real time graphing but also has the ability to perform HTTP,GET, POST, CMD and Email commands with a little utility that you leave running in the background. I have a home server that is normally on so it made sense to connect the base station to this machine for logging and running the utility. Since it isn't possible to update your twitter status from email I had to rely on a third party utility to update twitter for me. There are some that you can pay for but I found one that was free. It is called Twittermail and it merely inserts your emails into your twitter for you. I set up the utility to use my Gmail account and it sends the data from my gmail account to my twitter stream using a unique email address generated from Twittermail.  

Utility for emailing sensor data

I configured the utility to email me the temperatures of my fermenting bucket (I just left the sensor on the lid) and the Kitchen (where I leave bottles to condition for the first couple of weeks). This email is sent every hour and I made a new twitter account to receive the tweets which I then followed using my main account.  I don't think any of my followers would have taken too kindly to hourly temperature data. I only got this working this evening so I don't know if I have the transmission frequency right yet but the system is indeed tweeting my temperatures. 

Tweets with temperature data

I purchased the components from Audon in the UK and the batteries in the wireless sensors seem to last longer than a month which isn't too bad. I'm sure that an equivalent system could be built for much less than the cost of these sensors and if you have the time to build it then go for it.