Birallee Beer & Brewing: Flying Horses - American Amber Ale

flying horses american amber ale birallee brewing brewzilla brew day title image

Here's the run down from our latest brew day - our Flying Horses American Amber Ale. You can check out the link to the recipe at the bottom of this page.

We started out gathering our water. 23L in the BrewZilla and 12L in the Digiboil for sparging

Next, we added our brewing salts - calcium chloride, magnesium sulphate and calcium sulphate to reach our target water profile.

Next step was to acidify both the mash and sparge water using phosphoric acid. Interestingly, we acidifed our sparge water the night before we actually brewed, and noticed the pH had risen back a couple of tenths during that time, so we're going to leave our acidification until we're about to brew in the future.

Sparge water pH at 5.33 - right in the desired 5.2 - 5.6 range

Our pre-milled grains with a separate smaller bag of 100g light chocolate malt. We can only order in 100g increments, and we only need 50g of the light chocolate malt so we weigh it out separately

An uneventful mash in, with a little bit of extra water (recipe called for 22.2L, we used 23L)

If you haven't got one of these mash stirring paddles you can attach to your drill, do yourself a favour and get one. We've used ours for quite a few brews now and love how quick and efficient it makes stirring the grain through and importantly breaking up those clumps and dough balls to ensure maximum efficiency!

After mashing in we left the grain bed to settle for 10 minutes before taking our first pH reading. 5.44 was a bit higher than the expected 5.3, so we added another 0.5mL (or 1.0mL) of phosphoric acid to the mash to try and get it a little lower.

We took another reading approx 10 minutes later which showed a slightly reduced 5.4 pH now. Obviously with all the grains the buffering capacity of the mash is higher so more acid is required to drop the pH. We're always worried about overshooting and getting the pH too low so we err on the side of caution here.

We then began recirculating the mash using the built in BrewZilla pump and sergeant sparge head attachment

Mash temperature a little lower than the 67°C we were aiming for.

Yet another pH reading and we're a bit lower again, now in the 5.3x range so we're happy with this now

Managed to eventually hit our target mash temperature of 67°C - slightly higher than the "standard" 65°C to try and get a slightly less fermentable wort for a slightly higher FG for a little more residual sweetness which is what is expected in a style like amber ale.

Some more recirculation photos and you can see the wort is starting to clear up a little now

After the 60 minute mash we lifted the grain basket and began sparging.

Towards the end of the mash the recirculation really began to slow down, and this also meant the sparge flow was quite slow. Plenty of stirring was required to coax the sparge water down through the grain bed but we got there eventually

We hit our pre-boil volume of 26.5L so now time to wait for the boil to begin

Pre-boil gravity reading and it's bang on expected at 1.048

Pre-boil pH reading and we're at 5.36 - tiny bit lower than our last reading. Interesting that the pH variation is not as drastic as we had been lead to believe through the mash process

Whilst waiting for the BrewZilla to reach a boil, we began measuring out our hop additions. First one, 12g of CTZ for our main 30 minute bittering addition

Boil time and plenty of foam and hot break on top

First hop addition of CTZ being added

Rolling boil underway, but look at the temperature of our thermometer probe. The probe was right in the middle of the kettle but was only reading 96°C!

As far as we're aware there isn't an option to calibrate these, and last time we used it, it was reading perfectly fine (ie. showing 100°C during the boil). Anyway, after disconnecting and reconnecting the probe, it started reading again correctly. Weird, but hopefully this doesn't mean our mash temperature was off by a few degrees!?

Moving on, it was time to weigh out the hops for the rest of our boil additions

Yeast nutrient also weighed out to be added with 10 minutes left in the boil

Plus a half whirlfloc tablet to be added at the same time as the yeast nutrient

Temperature probe now showing 100°C during the boil after disconnect and reconnecting the temperature probe from the main unit.

Now weighing out our whirlpool hop additions for a 10 minute whirlpool at 80°C at the conclusion of the 30 minute boil

Whirlpool temperature started a bit higher than desired but eventually fell pretty close to the target 80°C

Post-boil gravity and we're a couple of points higher than expected, but also a bit dubious of this as this number doesn't really correlate based on the pre-boil gravity. We'll take a trusty floating hydrometer reading to double check this.

Wort settling nicely after the whirlpool

Wort chilled as much as possible with town water, so time to transfer to our Apollo Titan fermenter

Floating hydrometer reading shows actual original gravity of around 1.052 - more in line with what was expected and pretty much what was expected from the recipe.

After pitching the single packet of US-05 yeast, it took at least 24 hours for things to get underway, but once they did it chewed through the wort pretty fast.