Newcastle Brown Clone

I got this recipe from HomebrewTalk.com. Between going with what my LHBS has available and a general "why the hell not?" attitude, it's a bit different from the original (which was in turn a conversion to extract of an all-grain recipe). I've been doing all-grain for a while, but I'll be doing this batch on a weeknight -- and extract cuts a five hour brewday down to three.

Recipe

Ingredients:

  • 7.25 lb pale malt extract
  • 0.5 lb CaraPils
  • 0.5 lb Cara 8
  • 0.5 lb Cara 70
  • 0.5 lb Cara 120
  • 0.25 lb Chocolate Malt

Late-breaking addition: * 1 lb Gambrinus Organic Malt (to mash the CaraPils)

Hops:

  • 1 oz Willamette (5.1%) @ 60
  • 0.25 oz Goldings (5.1%) @ 15
  • 0.25 oz Goldings (5.1%) @ flameout

Yeast:

Nottingham (aka plan B).

Ack: Just realized that the CaraPils needs to be mashed! So much for copying recipes blindly from forums. :-) I'll head back next week to get a pound of 2-row or something.

Brew Day

3.25 lb of grain to mash, so I went with 7 quarts of water in my spagetti pot: 5 quarts for the grain plus 2 quarts dead space. Mashed at 154F for an hour; sparged with 5 quarts. Vorlaufed for the first time...whee! Got just over 1 gallon at 1.044.

The rest was extract, of course. I brought 4 gallons of tap water to a boil, then split it (which I TOTALLY meant to do ALL ALONG) to accommodate the gallon of wort and, what, 2 quarts or so of extract in my 5.5 gallon capacity pot. Lots of floaties (wait, wasn't the vorlaufing supposed to take care of this?) so I strained through cheesecloth. MacGyver time!

The boil was uneventful, which is good. I merged the two pots just before putting in the chiller. Unlike previous times, I got the wort down to 75F. Gravity was a whopping 1.070...cazart! I diluted with tap water 'til I got it down to 1.063. Pitched with Nottingham, then took the carboy down to the basement. I put it in a bigger bucket filled with water, and tossed in two ice packs.

That was 10pm. 7am the next morning there was no activity at all, and I was worried. Carboy thermometer showed 20C. By 10am fermentataion was just becoming visible, and by 6pm there was a nice kreusen. By 9pm it was overflowing...did I mention that this was a 5 gallon carboy? Quickly improvised a blow-off tube (MacGyver Time 2!) and tossed in more ice packs.

MacGyver Time!

So the gravity/strength is going to be 'way off, but what the hell. This should be okay.

Bottling

October 12 2009: I had to put this in mostly 1 litre bottles, because almost all my half-litre Grolsch bottles are tied up in the Lemon Blonde (which is just coming into its own). ABV came in at a whopping (for me) 7%. Lovely colour.

Tasting

First tasting, October 20 2009: Oh boy, this is not good. It's got a very strong acetone aroma. I know this has only been in the botle for a week, but this is going to take a long time to condition. I'll come back for it in maybe December or so...I don't think it'll be hard to be patient (unless I need the bottles).

Second tasting, November 29 2009: It's still horrible. Acetone less pronounced, but it's cloyingly sweet. I'll try it again in March, and if it's not drinkable then it goes down the holer..

Third tasting, January 15 2010: Didn't even taste this one; the smell alone was enough to put me off. I think this is irredeemable.