Tag Archives: American Brown Ale

11 Oct 2014
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Home brew reviews

American Brown Ale 1 – Review

This review has been a long time coming. The American Brown Ale 1 was brewed back on 22 June and it’s now October.

American Brown Ale 1

American Brown Ale 1 ready for drinking

First up is the aroma. This has a really nice toast and dark malt smell. There’s even hints of chocolate in there. Not a lot of hops, which is a bit of a surprise given the crystal hops in there. At the end there’s a yeast aroma, which is to be expected from beer brewed with kit yeast.

Taste up front is of light burnt malt. Light because the body is light as well. Not a lot of substance behind this. That is expected given it only has dry malt extract. While the body is light, the flavour is not. The dark malt characteristics comes out more bit by bit. Starting as a nice brown malt, moving into a burnt taste, then darker and more range. There’s a bit of a bite in there too. And that’s one of the few hop characteristics in this. Very slight fruit spice flavours on the edge.

After a while you start to notice the yeast flavours. A bit tart. Strange sort of yeast. Not the best. I’m not too concerned about that as it’s towards the back of the beer and not prominent. The malt seams to drive most of this beer. There is a strange dryness at the end which is slightly off putting. That might be due to the yeast as well.

Matching this beer isn’t too hard. Anything robust would work well. Anything with red meat would work. Even some chips and dip would go fine. Plus at 4.6% you can have a couple without worrying too much.

Happy with this brew. But it’s not really an American Brown. More of an English Brown. Next time I would add more hops, and use a better yeast.

-Mikey

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23 Jun 2014
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Experiments, Recipes

Something easy for winter, brown ale

A few days ago I made a mistake with bottling the Super Stout. There’s a chance that it won’t taste good. I want to have something darkish to enjoy over the rest of winter. So it was time to do a back up brew, something a bit basic and small. Enter the idea of doing a brown ale.

I spent a while playing around with a recipe ideas. In the end I decided to go with a really quick 30 minute boil and only two hop additions. Plus to keep the length of time down I wanted to do just four litres. Another factor keeping it simple and quick is to only use malt extract, in this case it was dry malt extract (DME).

American Brown Ale

American Brown Ale in the carboy

With the ingredients I had at home I couldn’t do an English style brown ale. Therefore I went with creating an American Brown Ale. Ingredients listed below.

  • 600 grams of Dark DME
  • 3 grams Warrior hops (30 mins in boil)
  • 2 grams Crystal hops (flame out)
  • 1 teaspoon of kit yeast
  • 1 teaspoon of yeast nutrient

Some people really don’t like using kit yeast. For me it was easy because (1) I had some at home and (2) it’s a very basic darker beer. The darkness of the malt will help hide some of the less desirable flavours of the yeast, I hope.

This was a three litre boil. First in went 400 grams of the DME. After the hot break went in the Warrior hops. Twenty minutes later the rest of the DME went in. Ten minutes after that flame out. Crystal hops went in. The pot was moved to sink to chill in cold water. About three trays of ice dropped directly into the wort. Only had to replace the water once for chilling. I was happy that it got down to about 22 degrees Celsius quite quickly. Then poured the wort through a sieve into the glass carboy which was then topped up to four litres.

While all that was happening the yeast and nutrient was re-hydrated in some water on the side. Before pitching in the yeast took a hydrometer reading which came in at 1.054. This should come in around 5.8% after bottling. That’s going to be stronger than the Super Stout!

This was a very quick brew and only took about two hours to do. Was done by myself and I like that it was so quick. The wort tasted basic as expected. There’s not a lot of hops in there and plan was to keep bitterness down. Fingers crossed that this one turns out well. Will know in about a month.

Keep an eye out as I’m going to be doing a lager style ale in the next few days.

-Mikey

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