The 1st Beer You Should Brew

Let’s say you are not sure you like craft beer.  Some on the market are just too hoppy for your taste.  You want to try brewing though, and want to make a beer your Bud Light taste buds can tolerate.  I recommend a basic pale ale that is on the low end of the hop intensity spectrum.  I am going to give you a list of ingredients that you can get from either Midwestsupplies.com or any local homebrew shop. All of the recipe ingredients are links so you know exactly what to get.

Convert Pale Ale

Ingredients:

6 lbs       Golden/Light LME (liquid malt extract)

1 lbs       Crystal 10L (actual crushed grain in a cheese cloth bag)

2 oz        Cascade pellet hops

1            Dry Ale Yeast

1tsp       Irish Moss

4 gal       Spring Water (1 gal jugs from Wal-Mart.  Get these as cold as possible without freezing)

First off be CLEAN! Use a sterilizer like Star San to clean you primary fermenter and anything else that touches the beer after the boil.

In a large stainless steel pot that holds at least 3.5 gallons of water bring 2.5 gallons of tap water to a temperature of about 155 degrees.  Add the 1lb of Crystal 10 that is in a cheese cloth bag to the water and let it soak for 20 minutes.  Make sure you ordered you grain crushed otherwise you will need to do it.  Remove the bag of grain after the 20 minutes and let it drip as much of the liquid as possible back into the pot, and then discard.  Take the pot off of the heat and add the 6lbs of LME and make sure to stir it into the water so that it is all dissolved and nothing is going to be on the bottom of the pot.  Put back onto heat and bring to a boil.  Once the boil starts at 1 oz of the Cascade hops to the pot (just dump them in).  Start a timer for 60 minutes.  At the 15 min remaining mark at 1 tsp of Irish Moss, at the 5 minute mark at the last 1 oz of Cascade hops.  Take this off the heat and add it to your primary fermenter.  Then add in the almost freezing gallons of spring water until you get about 5.5 gallons of liquid in your primary fermenter.  Make sure the temperature is below 80 degrees before you dump in the yeast.  Once the yeast is in close up the fermenter and give it a shake for about 2 minutes. This will help oxygenate the water.  There are other ways to do this so do what works best for you.  Leave this in the primary for 2 weeks and bottle with 5 oz of priming sugar added to a second bottling bucket that you siphon off the beer to leaving the trub (bottom junk behind).  You can also move the liquid to a secondary fermenter to clarify your beer before bottling.  For this you can leave the beer in the primary fermenter for a week and then move to the secondary for 2 weeks.  If using a glass carboy as the secondary fermenter you will see the beer settle out and know when to move it to the bottling bucket and bottle as normal. 

I hope you enjoy this simple starter recipe and continue to homebrew.  Below are the technical spec and results you should get out of this recipe.  Email me with any questions you may have.

Starting Gravity 1.049

Finishing Gravity 1.012

IBU 20.5

SRM 6.2

ABV 4.9%