One of my favorite commercial beers here in New Zealand is
Mac’s Sassy Red so I decided to have a go at making something similar. I found a recipe for an approximation called ‘Slutty Red‘ and I converted it for extract brewing and made a few mods based on ingredients available and getting some good advice on the home brewing forums.
The main hops flavour in Sassy Red comes from Motueka hops. These used to be known as ‘B Saaz’ hops (as they were bred by crossing Saaz with New Zealand breeding selection), and hence the name ‘Sassy Red’ for a Saazy beer.
One new experimental thing I did in this batch was using a pre-hopped kit as part of the fermentables. Why? Cost – the unhopped malt extract in either dry or liquid format costs significantly more than a corresponding amount of pre-hopped kit. I reckon it’s a supply and demand thing – more people are buying the kits than malt extract. So I used a can of Coopers Lager as it is one of the lighter ones available. Since it is already hopped I factored this into my bitterness calculations using the handy
Kit & Extract Beer Designer. With most of the bittering coming from the Coopers can, I went with a 30 min boil instead of the usual 60 min as I was primarily just doing flavour & aroma hop additions after steeping the specialty grains.
So here’s the recipe and beer profile:
Grains:
CaraAroma – 0.15 kg
Caramel Wheat Malt – 0.15 kg
Dark Crystal 270 – 0.05 kg
Chocolate Malt 600 – 0.05 kg
Other Fermentables:
Light dry malt extract – 1.5 kg
Coopers Lager kit – 1.7 kg
Hops:
Pacific Jade – 10g @ 30 Mins
Motueka – 5g @ 30 Mins
Motueka – 15g @ 20 Mins
Motueka – 20g @ 10 Mins
Motueka – 40g @ 0 Mins
Motueka – 20g DRY HOPPED
Expected Profile
OG – 1.046
IBU – 45.2
FG – 1.012
EBC – 23.7
%alc – 4.8
Full writeup at:
http://beerandgarden.com/batch-no-6-aidans-slutty-red
Aidan's Slutty Red, my Mac's Sassy Red clone
Linear Mode
