Blonde Ale Centennial Blonde (Simple 4% All Grain, 5 & 10 Gall)

Nottingham is almost a wonder yeast!
I have used it for 10 gal of bigger beer than this.

See this experiment by the man......

https://www.homebrewtalk.com/showthread.php?t=40273



Tom

dokken5 said:

Newbie question

Why is the same amount of yeast used for a five gallon batch as a ten? Shouldn't that be increased too??

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Yes, I would use two packets for the 10 gallon batch.

Edit: looks like some people will just use 1 packet so maybe it works, but I personally would use two.

dokken5 said:

Newbie question



Why is the same amount of yeast used for a five gallon batch as a ten? Shouldn't that be increased too??

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Well from what I read with Palmer and have been told one packet of wyeast is good for 5 gallons and it has 100 billion cells so Nottingham is a dry yeast with 200 billion cells! It should have enough to to the 10 gallon batches since you only need 75-120 billion yeast cells to do the work in a 5 gallon batch.

For what it's worth i brewed 10 gallons with 1 pack of Nottingham and had great results.

I agree. I brewed 10 gallons that is now ready to keg and I only used 1 pack. It was done fermenting in a week and 2 days.

So circumstance dictated it was time to finally brew up the famous Centennial Blonde. Under pressure from my friends and their SWMBO to make some light and easy going for the BMC Crowd, a company xmas party impending, and somehow running out of English hops, time time has come!

So I gave it a valiant effort. Carefully reading the recipe about 3 times, noticing the 70% efficiency I decided to drop some base grain to not overshoot. I have heard many a story of the "6%! My god can you make anything that isn't strong?" This being the batch to do it. Nope. Even dropping the grain I still managed to fail miserably and get 1.052 on the OG. Oopsie.

Looked and smelled great, the morning after my condo still smells of hops. No doubt it will be a quality crowdpleaser. Just a little disappointed in myself for missing the intended "session" qualities. Will likely post back with results.

I followed the recipe and didn't that high of gravity. I'm k egging it in about an hour ( really when I get off my a**) but final is at .012. So 4.2%. Sample last night tasted good. Just like bmc drinkers would like with a little hop addition. Will be good to give to friends to introduce to homebrew. But personally, I prefer my English brown ales.

rythmabduction said:

I followed the recipe and didn't that high of gravity. I'm k egging it in about an hour ( really when I get off my a**) but final is at .012. So 4.2%. Sample last night tasted good. Just like bmc drinkers would like with a little hop addition. Will be good to give to friends to introduce to homebrew. But personally, I prefer my English brown ales.

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If your gravity is consistently lower, I'd recommend learning about extract efficiency and adjusting recipes to meet expectations. Maybe that's nothing new to you and your numbers were just down. Either way, sounds like you brewed a nice beer.

I made this over the weekend and am anxious to try it.

I'm fairly new to AG and just setup a small RIMS along with my mash tun. I'm kind of using this recipe to help figure my losses and efficiencies.

Even though I came up a half gallon short going into the fermenter, I still hit my desired OG.

I'm really looking forward to trying this beer.

@kirbcheck my gravity are rarely low. Just commenting on the post above mine as he hit .052 OG. I hit .042 on mine. .052 is really high for this recipe, even after he lowered the grain bill. The original post by beirmuncher has an estimated OG of less than .040 for the grain at 70% effeceincy. The poster above my original comment must be hitting 83%+ was all I was replying to.

rythmabduction said:

@kirbcheck my gravity are rarely low. Just commenting on the post above mine as he hit .052 OG. I hit .042 on mine. .052 is really high for this recipe, even after he lowered the grain bill. The original post by beirmuncher has an estimated OG of less than .040 for the grain at 70% effeceincy. The poster above my original comment must be hitting 83%+ was all I was replying to.

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That would be me! I'm not too sure what the heck happened there myself. I believe the exact number for that batch came out at 84.5%. It is only my 2nd 10g batch on this setup, seems I have to get a bit more familiar with it.

That said the same setup just yielded me 75% today on a 1kg higher grain bill. Smaller batch this time around so maybe a lesser amount of sparge water had something to do with it. I'll get my bearings one of these days. I sure hope it's soon these wild swings in efficiency can change the end result quite a bit.

Edit: Perhaps this being mostly fermentables and the other having more dark grains had something do to with it?

dokken5 said:

Newbie question

Why is the same amount of yeast used for a five gallon batch as a ten? Shouldn't that be increased too??

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Dry yeast, if sprinkled directly into 5 gallons of wort, has an attrition rate of 50%. And is sufficient to ferment the batch. When hydrated prior to pitching, viable yeast cell count would be sufficient for a 10 gallon batch.

TrustyOlJohnson said:

Dry yeast, if sprinkled directly into 5 gallons of wort, has an attrition rate of 50%. And is sufficient to ferment the batch. When hydrated prior to pitching, viable yeast cell count would be sufficient for a 10 gallon batch.

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Actually, what a few of us have already said is that 1 pack worked great for a 10 gallon batch. I plan to brew this again and I plan to use 1 pack without hydrating like I previously did. On that note, hydrating the yeast sure won't hurt anything.

Going to be doing a test run of this as my first extract batch but no lhbs near me has the extra light dme. Would it turn out okay with light dme instead?

Opiate42 said:

Going to be doing a test run of this as my first extract batch but no lhbs near me has the extra light dme. Would it turn out okay with light dme instead?

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I have no experience with extract brewing aside from a couple of the prehopped cans as my first few batches. From what I have read though it will be fine, slightly darker and perhaps a touch maltier than using the XLDME. Use a late extract addition to try and keep it light. Happy brewing!

Opiate42 said:

Going to be doing a test run of this as my first extract batch but no lhbs near me has the extra light dme. Would it turn out okay with light dme instead?

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I've done this with extract and it's turned out fine. It's a good recipe no matter which way you go.


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Ugh...post on wrong place

Helly said:

I've done this with extract and it's turned out fine. It's a good recipe no matter which way you go.


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Awesome thanks!

And now for something completely different!

Well, kinda, sorta.

I'm brewing 10 gallons of the Centennial Blonde using my new DIY keggle (Thanks HBT!) next weekend. I'll spit the wort into 2 carboys of 5 gallons each. 1st simply will have the Wyeast 1056 as the change and the other carboy I'll try White Labs 001. I'm going for a session, Hop Forward, Blonde by dry hopping in the secondary in batch #2.

So with 1 brew day & the same amount of work, I'll have 2 completely different beers.

I have planned 2.0 oz. of each Amarillo, Citra, & Simcoe for 5 days in the Secondary. Do you guys think Columbus would be a good addition too?

My experiments with Columbus have been........................... OK....................... I've done it every which way. As a mixture I've had better luck. As a bittering hop it can overpower anything else I add.

So I am going to brew this AGAIN but this time I plan to do a 10 gallon batch. The problem is I only have an 8 gallon kettle and about a 12 gallon kettle. Is it ok to fill one of the the kettles out of the mash tun and then the second kettle until I hit the pre-boil volume? Then boil them seperately for an hour?

BigPicture said:

And now for something completely different!

Well, kinda, sorta.

I'm brewing 10 gallons of the Centennial Blonde using my new DIY keggle (Thanks HBT!) next weekend. I'll spit the wort into 2 carboys of 5 gallons each. 1st simply will have the Wyeast 1056 as the change and the other carboy I'll try White Labs 001. I'm going for a session, Hop Forward, Blonde by dry hopping in the secondary in batch #2.

So with 1 brew day & the same amount of work, I'll have 2 completely different beers.

I have planned 2.0 oz. of each Amarillo, Citra, & Simcoe for 5 days in the Secondary. Do you guys think Columbus would be a good addition too?

My experiments with Columbus have been........................... OK....................... I've done it every which way. As a mixture I've had better luck. As a bittering hop it can overpower anything else I add.

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A couple things:
-First, wyeast 1056 and WLP001 are the same yeast. Maybe you meant something different?
-That is a cubic buttload of hops to dryhop this beer with. I think you run the risk of overdoing it with this very light beer. To each his own, but I think an ounce of dryhop per 5 gallons is more than enough here. I keg hopped my last batch with an ounce of centennial and it was great, but got dinged in a competition for being too hop forward for style.
-Columbus is a rough hop. I have used it in a couple of beers and some people just find it too much. Dry hopping with it is certainly different, but again, you are going to whack this beer out of balance with too much in the hops side.

I really think you would be better served with a session IPA recipe that can withstand all this.

This keg has long since kicked, and the grass is all brown now. But still, I had the picture so why not post it up??

How will amarillo as the aroma hops work in this. My LHBS was out of Cascade but they did have centenniel as the bittering hops.

Takin a couple 6 packs of this to a homebrew exchange in a bit!

Thanks for the input. I'll cut the Columbus OUT, and reduce the dry hop to 1 oz. of each of the 3.

I've done a dry hop of an additional 1.0 oz of each the Centennial & the Cascade. Sure it added more aroma to the beer. Ended up with simply a more pungent form of the same beer, good but the original was better.

I've never done both the WYeast 1056 & WL001 side by side on the same beer. In itself that will be fun. Add a HUGE mix of other hops............... and it will be interesting.

The original recipe from BM is fantastic. I love it. The simple little tricks of changing things up is a huge benefit. Variety is key. Increases my knowledge in brewing, HBT is instrumental in this too. I've tried a few different things with this beer, fruit, hops, yeast, and it usually is the 1st or 2nd tap I kick. This next summer I'll add orange spice to the recipe.

This keggle is a huge plus too. 10 gallons split into 2 beers will keep my keezer full and feed my need to diversify while still keeping true to the original recipe.

Thank You. I'll let you know how it comes out. :rockin:

Drinking one from my first batch right now. I dry hopped with a half ounce each of Centennial and. Cascade. Added some aroma, but not much. A nice lighter ale to balance out the hop monsters, porters and stouts I have too.

I will say that the Notty yeast produced some funky aromas for a few days. Like, rotting meat funky. It wasn't infected, and the aroma faded after a few days and is totally gone now, but it was pungent there for awhile.


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@Rythmabduction I apologize, I didn't get caught up on the thread, read your post and assumed you were curious as to why your gravity was low. Having caught up on posts, I see how that was a poor assumption.

Zepth said:

That would be me! I'm not too sure what the heck happened there myself. I believe the exact number for that batch came out at 84.5%. It is only my 2nd 10g batch on this setup, seems I have to get a bit more familiar with it.

That said the same setup just yielded me 75% today on a 1kg higher grain bill. Smaller batch this time around so maybe a lesser amount of sparge water had something to do with it. I'll get my bearings one of these days. I sure hope it's soon these wild swings in efficiency can change the end result quite a bit.

Edit: Perhaps this being mostly fermentables and the other having more dark grains had something do to with it?

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@Zepth, just a note, but higher gravity beers have a lower extraction efficiency. So the fact that you added a pound of grain and drew off less wort could be enough reason to come up 10% short on efficiency. To get a real idea of efficiency brew a few beers in the middle of the road in terms of OG. Expect lower efficiency with higher gravity beers... Cheers!

Howdy all,

I entered this beer into a local homebrew competition (my first one) and took 3rd place in category 6! The beer scored a 35 and the only real "negative" comment was that it had a strong, but good hop aroma (I dry hopped it with a half ounce of Centennial and Cascade each for 7 days). The next time I brew this I'll be sure to remove (or minimize) the dry hop and/or possibly change the yeast, but otherwise I'm very pleased with this beer.

Thank you very much, BierMuncher, your recipe is fantastic!

I have been lurking here for a while and BM's Centennial Blonde recipe looked like a hit, so I brewed 2 extract batches, and I can say after 6 days in fermenters, taste great so far. Soooo, I tried to brew a BIAB AG, and got distracted.... (to many home brews while setting up) and wound up doughing in at 168 F! I swear it said 158! lol Anyway, mashed at 162 for 20+ mins before I realized the error in my ways. Anyway of salvaging this into something I want to drink? Different yeast help? Any ideas would be great! Thanks,

Ibrew2

Did I say it would be the same amount of work???????????????????????

Aaaaahhhhhhh...................................... no.

2 big batches into it and it's getting better. 6 hours for each batch.................... total. My beer club is telling me to batch sparge over a longer time to improve taste. So I've added 1 hour to my BEST time of 4 hours on my previous 5 gallon batches.

My goal is 5 hours from start to finish. I've got to get some buddies to brew with me. 5 hours of football in the rain on a Sunday was kinda a bummer. Next time I'll make it an event!

I brewed this recipe about a month ago and it has been on tap for a couple of weeks. The beer tastes good, but it tastes a little "grainy". I'm thinking it could be astringency?

I'm pretty new to all grain (this was my 5th batch I think) and I didn't do anything to treat the mash pH. This is definitely the palest all grain batch I've brewed, maybe my mash pH was a little too high?

Anyway, thanks for the great recipe BierMuncher! :rockin:

Just finished brewing this one. I'm very happy with the flavors coming out of the kettle...now I'm waiting on Nottingham to do its job. Looking forward to the finished product! Thanks for the recipe!

Just had my first glass of this one. Great beer, pretty stoked! Didn't hit all my numbers, so still room for improvement!

What I actually brewed was this:
4kg 2-row
250gr Cara-pils
250gr Crystal 10
250gr Munich

10gr Centennial at 55 for 10 IBU
10gr Centennial at 35 for 9 IBU
10gr Cascade at 20 for 3 IBU
10gr Cascade at 5 for 1 IBU

Mashed at 65.5 for almost 90 minutes because I had problems getting my sparge water up to temp (forgot to start heating in time).

Pitched a single S-05, which was almost 10% underpitched.

OG at 1.046, stopped at 1.013. Had expected it to go lower.

Long story short...on my first all grain BIAB...I managed to get a little lost in the process and doubled all of the hops additions. Needless to say the IBU's are much higher than expected (47). Any thoughts on making the best of this situation?

Dry hop a bit and treat it like a very light color/body IPA? Just roll with the bitterness? The flavor isn't bad...just not great.

Sorry if this has been asked before, but hundreds of pages of commentary is a bit too much to sift through.

RunDadRun said:

Long story short...on my first all grain BIAB...I managed to get a little lost in the process and doubled all of the hops additions. Needless to say the IBU's are much higher than expected (47). Any thoughts on making the best of this situation?

Dry hop a bit and treat it like a very light color/body IPA? Just roll with the bitterness? The flavor isn't bad...just not great.

Sorry if this has been asked before, but hundreds of pages of commentary is a bit too much to sift through.

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So when I brew and make "mistakes" (which happens to us all!!), I generally just roll with it. The worst that can happen is you make something that you weren't aiming for and isn't your taste (lesson learned). Although, honestly in most of the cases where I thought I've really screwed up my batch, it ends up all good. Yeah, it may not be the product I was planning on, but it's always mine and I enjoy sharing it with others. There's always the next batch...

Agree with ^

RunDadRun said:

Long story short...on my first all grain BIAB...I managed to get a little lost in the process and doubled all of the hops additions. Needless to say the IBU's are much higher than expected (47). Any thoughts on making the best of this situation?

Dry hop a bit and treat it like a very light color/body IPA? Just roll with the bitterness? The flavor isn't bad...just not great.

Sorry if this has been asked before, but hundreds of pages of commentary is a bit too much to sift through.

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Just think of it as a Pale Ale instead of a blonde.... I wouldn't dry hop... just let it go.... I'd let it sit in primary for three weeks at least... will also get some of the hops out that way.... if you bottle instead of keg.. theres another three weeks...

I bet it turns out to be a nice pale ale.

I've got a question about this recipe, I recently did a similar extract version of this using 6 lbs Golden Light DME and 1 lb Carapils (steeped @ 160° for ~20 mins), same hop timing but just a tad more to make up for the extra DME.

Coming in at 5.5% on this.

The taste out of the fermenter is warm Budweiser. Warm, flat Budweiser... is this what the original recipe tastes like? Is it basically a BMC clone? Or did I overdo the malt and mess up the balance that was originally intended?

Either way, I'll be happy with the end result. Definitely going to be a "conversion" beer.

Psylocide said:

The taste out of the fermenter is warm Budweiser. Warm, flat Budweiser... is this what the original recipe tastes like? Is it basically a BMC clone?

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Not in my opinion, BUT...

I did the ORIGINAL extract version for a fishing trip because I knew this would be light enough for my BMC family members who aren't too keen on the hoppy pales/IPAs.

Needless to say, if they weren't drinking Michelob Golden Light on the boat, they were crushing this at the cabin.

Have had great success with this one in the past. Today I'm giving it a shot substituting 2 row with some Fawcett Pearl! First time using Pearl as well.