Mac & Jack African Amber - Mao's Red Hat Amber

Brew Day!
A clone of Mac and Jack's Amber is up today - although we are calling it Mao's Red Hat Amber.
10 gal batch
OG Target - 1.055
Mast Temp 151 (66C)
Hop Schedule:
Centennial 2 60 9.2% 30.23
Cascade 2 5 6.9% 4.52
Cascade 2.75 0 6.9% 0.00

We'll update as we go!

Mashing now - had a bit of fluctuation with our temps for the first 20 min. Had to add a liter of water to the MT to drop the temp from 69c to 66c during those first 20min. Consistant temps from that point on.
About to raise the MT temp to 80c for 10min - then we will transfer to the LT and start sparging as that water is already at 80c.

The assistant brewer is with us again today as well.

I think we are doing fairly well - waiting for the pre-boil wort to chill down a bit so we get a decent gravity reading - then we will be able to sort out our efficiency.
Wort is on the massive burner that we picked up this week - I went to take a picture of it, but the camera ran out of juice.
First runnings from sparge clocked in at 1.061.
Last running was 1.014
Pre-boil reading = 1.044

60min hops added at 4:42

Efficiency was 64% - which is less than we were shooting for. I'll blame it on our inexperience and the issues we had with the temps for mashing and sparging. Something to work on.
Wort is chilling in an ice bath right now (wort chiller should be in for next week) - then we'll get the post-boil gravity reading.
Primary for 21 days with 7 days of dry hopping.

Post-boil gravity reading was 1.047 - 8 points shy of our target of 1.055. That is a bit disappointing, but for our 2nd brew, and the first without our brewing master holding our hands, not too shabby. We'll need to review our sparging and mashing techniques as this is where we lost efficiency points.
Pitched Safale - 04. It will sit in the fermenter for 21 days - with a 7 day dry hop of 2oz of cascade.

High krausen just ended - it is looking and smelling good!

I'm curious, what yeast did you use?

I brewed this recipe this weekend as well, and had to put the blow off hose on. Used wyeast 1335 british ale. Must be the yeast, not a huge grainbill. I usually only have this problem with barleywines, maybe I got the fermenter a tad too full.

What has you living in China? Curious minds want to know!

DB_Cooper said:

I'm curious, what yeast did you use?

I brewed this recipe this weekend as well, and had to put the blow off hose on. Used wyeast 1335 british ale. Must be the yeast, not a huge grainbill. I usually only have this problem with barleywines, maybe I got the fermenter a tad too full.

Click to expand...

We used safale 04 for this one. It was going off 12 hours in. This pic is about 24 hours after pitching. Like I said above, we missed our target gravity reading, but so it goes. Let me know how your brew turns out! I'm not even sure what a blowoff tube looks like...but that is because I am new to all of this. We open ferment, so it just does its thing and we are happy to watch it go!

Hokie - I teach high school English at an international school in Beijing. And I am here because being a high school English teacher at a US public school isn't worth the grief or the low pay!

Mine blew the fermenter lid clean off, the airlock got plugged. So I put a hose from the lid to a jar so it could blow foam out. I usually only need to for high gravity beers. Good luck with your brew!

6 days into the primary and our reading is at 1.017. We are hoping to get down to 1.015 before dry hopping. Any suggestions on dropping it a bit more are welcome!
Looks like this will be a decent session brew as we will be around 4%abv instead of 6%. Learning as we go!

We kegged this on Tuesday night - pretty dissapointing to say the least. FG came in at .017 - which left us with a ABV of 3.6%. Weak to no malt backbone and heavy bitterness. I am hoping that the bitterness will chill out as it sits in the keg and maybe it turns into a decent session beer.

Again, live and learn. We are brewing up an IPA on Friday night and I am hoping our efficiency improves this time around. We will be more careful with the processes involved and see how it goes.