First brew. American red ale.

In the middle of our first brew. Went into primary fermentation last Monday.

Recipe Type: Extract W/ specialty grain
Yeast: White Labs California Ale WLP001
Yeast Starter: No
Additional Yeast or Yeast Starter: None
Batch Size (Gallons): 5.5
Original Gravity: 1.062
Final Gravity: 1.0??
IBU: 50
Boiling Time (Minutes): 60
Color: 13
Primary Fermentation (# of Days & Temp): 7+
Secondary Fermentation (# of Days & Temp): ??

American Red Ale

Grain:
7 lbs. light DME
10 oz. Carmel/Crystal Malt 75L
4 oz. Carmel/Crystal Malt 120L

Hops:
1 oz. Magnum for 60 minutes
1.25 oz. Amarillo for 5 minutes

We had a few hickups but nothing major so far. Small boil over after adding the DME but we caught it almost immediately. Also had one blowout with the airlock after fermentation started, but it was small and again was taken care of fairly quickly. It looks like we may end up with a little higher IBU than we were originally planning but... eh. Definitely a learning experience! will post again when we get a final gravity reading!

 

Oh, also. We seem to have a rather high original gravity, 1.062, does the addition of specialty malts raise the OG? If it does, i am guessing it would add non-fermentable sugars?

Any other thoughts or suggestions?

 

If you brewed this from a kit and the kit specified the OG, you got almost exactly that OG but your measurement got skewed by not getting the concentrated wort mixed with the top off water. The usual complaint on that is a low OG, but sometimes the sample gets the more concentrated wort and it reads high. No problem, the yeast will mix it all up for you.

I noticed that your recipe also calls for a primary of 7 days and then a secondary. Two things come to mind for that. First is setting a time for the yeast to work. They follow their own schedule and not yours so let them tell you when they are done. The second thing that comes to mind is that you are brewing a red ale. This is not a super high gravity beer nor does it have any required additions that make a secondary necessary so skip the secondary. Just leave your beer in the primary until it is done, well done actually because when it looks like the fermentation is done, it really is only half done as the second half doesn't release any CO2 to make bubbles. Leave your beer for 2 to 3 weeks, take a hydrometer sample, take another sample in a couple days and if they match, bottle.

 

Cool! Thanks for the advice on not doing a secondary and just leaving it be! That will definitely save time and hassle.
We actually came up with this recipe and just plugged everything into brewsmith and that's where we got all our "expected" limits and such. We have the setup to do a full boil, probably should have mentioned that in the OP, so we didn't have to add any water to cool the wort, just used a emersion chiller.


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