PenSans Brewery - Jem's Wicked Red Recipe

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Jem's Wicked Red Recipe

INFO for 23 litres at OG ~ 1042, ~ 28 IBU

Limited process info, specific to Jem's Wicked Red is given here.

For more detailed info on the PenSans process go here.

MALTS	Amount : Metric	Amount : Imperial
Lager / Pale Ale Malt (82%)	3.830 kg	8.43 lb
Amber Malt (Home Made !) (10%)	0.470 kg	1.03 lb
Crystal Malt (5%)	0.230 kg	0.51 lb
Black Malt (1.5%)	0.070 kg	2.5 oz
Roast Barley (Home Made !) (1.5%)	0.070 kg	2.5 oz

HOPS	Purpose	Boil Time	Metric	Imperial	~ IBUs
Southern Brewer @ 8.7%	Bittering	90 mins	8 g	0.3 oz	9 IBU
Cascades @ 4.8%	Bittering	90 mins	30 g	1 oz	19 IBU

Help me with bitterness calculations !

YEAST

Whitbread Ale Yeast, try Wyeast 1098

MINERALS	PPM
Calcium (Ca)	150
Magnesium (Mg)	20
Sodium (Na)	40
Sulphate (SO₄)	200
Carbonate (CO₃)	100
Chloride (Cl₂)	300

Help me with minerals using a spreadsheet !

Help me with minerals with a general discussion !

MASH LIQUOR

In your hot liquor tank, adjust the pH using an acid solution to a value of 6.1-6.3.
I choose not to add my minerals to the hot liquor tank, choosing instead to add it to the mash liquor in the mash tun prior to mash in.
Calculate the amount of mash liquor required as being 2.3 litres for every kilo of grain and then add on the volume of any deadspace, e.g. beneath the false bottom if your tun has such a thing.
Calculate your strike temperature to get an initial mash temperature of 66蚓.
Add minerals to the liquor in the tun. The minerals that can dissolve will dissolve in the couple of minutes that you spend gently stirring to ensure a settled liquor temperature.
Mash in using the gentle approach, not the "pour from a dizzy height" or "use a hand drill" approaches. See the PenSans Process section for more.
Mash duration 90 minutes.

NOTES ON INGREDIENTS

The amount of each ingredient was chosen to give around 23 litres of wort for fermenting. My reasons for this are that (assuming you live in a metric world of sorts) the fermentation buckets are 25 litres in size and 23 litres of wort allows for 2 litres of headspace, not a lot, but its balanced by the fact that you can get 20 litres of beer to bottle !
The basic premise in this recipe, other than the fact that you would like a tasty beer, is that you are trying to tweak the ingredient profile in such a way that your final beer, when held up against the light, will look WICKEDLY RED !! More information on that is given in the Wicked Red Discussion Page
So you're probably confused about an English man .. . in Africa . . . brewing ales . . . and using lager malt as the base malt ?! Well stop, its just that the local brewing industry doesn't exactly see a lot of pale malt on offer. . . HUGE amounts of lager malt and little else . . . so the brewer goes with the flow . . . no apologies but use pale if you can get it !
Amber malt is used to up the body a little and to try and get some more complexity to the malt character. If you make your own amber malt as I explain elsewhere on this site then you will well know the strong biscuit aroma that fills your house when you roast it up. Gorgeous. 'Proper Job' as the Cornish would say . . .
If you have a crystal malt with a low colour ("Lovibond") rating, then 5% is fine, if you have a higher colour rating then maybe drop the recipe to 3 to 4% and up the lager / pale to compensate. Its all crucial for the colour you see !
The hops are chosen to give a single one off introduction for bittering purposes without any further additions. The aim is to keep the overall hop flavour and aroma profiles low so that the malt flavours come to the fore. However, in order to not completely lose the complexity that hop character can bring to a beer, I added the bittering hops according to a FIRST WORT HOPPING schedule, namely, once I have around 20% of my spargings in the boiler and the power to the boiler is now on, I add the bittering hops. This is up to 45 minutes before boil start but can pop some nice aroma qualitites into the beer that the usual approach (adding the bittering hops after boil start) cannot do. If you don't believe me, then go visit The Brewery web site and see what George Fix has to say on the matter.
Southern brewer hops you say ?! Ha ! This is my turn to get back at all those people who put in hard to get hops at every turn ! Just go for whatever low flavour, decent bittering hop you can get, its boiled for 90 minutes anyway, I use it because its easily available in South Africa. As a high alpha acid hop (circa 9%) it allows my hop stocks to go a little further ! It also does not have a totally unpleasant aroma and so using it in the first wort hopping approach is OK. At least one commercial brewer in South Africa uses this hop to put flavour and aroma in its beer, not much, but its there.

MASH-OUT / SPARGING

Adjust the pH of the sparge liquor in your hot liquor tank to around 5.7, again using an acid solution.
In terms of sparge temperature, some brewers can add sufficient sparge liquor to "mash out", meaning to raise the mash up to 75蚓 at mash-end so as to stop further enzyme actitivty. However, those of us that can't directly heat their mash tuns or add further liqour should aim to sparge at around 75蚓. This at least keeps the run off at low viscosity so it runs off easier. I have previously sparged one of my other beers, Trelawney Ale, at temperatures up to 82蚓. When you sparge with liquor this hot, the mash will eventually rise to around 75蚓 after the hour's sparge. Using sparge liquor at 75蚓 on a mash that finishes at 63蚓 ain't going to see any mash-out taking place. However, I have recently experienced hazy beers due to the 82蚓 sparge liquor which I do not see at 75蚓. So, even though the "mash-out" stage is never really reached, RDWHAHB !
If you follow the suggested mashing in approach you should have minimal need for recirculation. Once the runnings are clear, sparge at such a rate that it takes 45-60 minutes to collect all your wort.

THE BOIL

The bittering hops are added as a single first wort hopping approach, see above.
Boil time is 90 minutes.
Add Irish Moss when you have 15-20 minutes of the boil to go.
After 90 minutes, turn off the heating source, give a gentle but strong stir to get the whirlpool effect going and then put the lid on your boiler
Allow the wort to settle for 30-40 minutes to allow the trub and hop debris to settle.

THE BIG CHILL

Chill to pitching temperature (18-22蚓) using either an immersion chiller or a counter flow chiller.

OXYGENATE

I STRONGLY recommend that you invest in a stainless steel 'stone' with a porosity rating of a couple micron and use this, with an oxygen bottle, to inject suitable oxygen levels into the wort prior to pitching. Its a part of the real brewing process . . . if you can afford it, don't compromise !

FERMENTATION

Ferment at the correct temperature range for your yeast, this is typically 18-20蚓 for an ale yeast.
If you have made some cracking good wort, cared for it well, chilled it to the right pitching temperature, oxygenated correctly and fermented with sufficient yeast then your primary fermentation shouldn't take more than 4 days. After this, allow it to rest a day or two longer to ensure the yeast has done a thorough job.
You should then transfer to a secondary fermentor with finings and allow a further 2-3 days for things to settle out.

WHAT THEN ?!

Bottle or keg as you normally would. Jem's Wicked Red is presently chilled to 3蚓 for 3 days prior to filtration at 5痠 and force carbonated. In 7-10 days I can have a great keg of WICKEDLY RED ale ready to drink !

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