Light and crisp; American Cream Ale is a great light, no-frills beer to make for the summer. Done right, it will rival all the American Lagers your swill drinking friends drink and you’ll be making yourself on the cheap. The best part of American Cream Ale is that it is an ale!!!! You don’t need to lager or cold ferment which takes a dedicated fridge to do it right.

Fire up the brew kettles and give this Cream Ale a shot. I modified the recipe from Jamil’s “Brewing Classic Styles” to use Nobel Saaz hops. I wanted it to have a little more of that European lager like quality to confuse my light beer drinking friends and family (Oh you know who you are). The key to brewing a great cream ale is the neutral qualities of American Ale yeast. I use US-05 dry yeast from Fermentis, but I used it from a slurry off a previous beer. I love that yeast as a second pitch yeast. It is so clean. Much cleaner than I have ever gotten out of a White Labs WLP001 from a starter. (though I am sure that repitching WLP001 if you have it would be just as clean). Focus on a good pitch of super healthy yeast and your Cream ale will be so clean and crisp, you’ll probably brew it several times a year just to slake your thirst.

Mike’s All-grain American Cream Ale Recipe

BJCP Style 6A

Size: 6.0 gal
Efficiency: 70.0%
Attenuation: 80.0%
Original Gravity: 1.052
Terminal Gravity: 1.010
Color: 3.3
Alcohol: 5.5%
Bitterness: 17.85

Ingredients:
5 lbs Pilsner Malt
5 lbs 2-Row Brewers Malt
1 lbs Corn Flaked (Maize)
1 lbs White Table Sugar (Sucrose)
0.85 oz Saaz (5.0%) - added during boil, boiled 60 min
0.5 oz Saaz (5.0%) - added during boil, boiled 2 min
2 tsp Irish Moss - added during boil, boiled 15 min
1 ea Fermentis US-05
Mash In -152 °F

John’s Partial Mash Cream Ale Recipe

4 lbs. American 2-row Pale
0.25 lbs. American Caramel 10°L
3 lbs. Dry Extra Light Extract
0.50 lbs. Flaked Corn
0.5 oz. Cluster Pellets boiled 60 min.
0.5 oz. Cascade Pellets boiled 15 min.
WYeast 1056 American Ale

Check out the cream ale brewing notes on this partial mash recipe.

Here in the Northeast, specifically the Boston area, we have been locked in a heat wave.  The past 4 days have been steamy with temps over 90 degrees.  Sorry to those who experience hot weather on a regular basis…we just aren’t that used to this type of heat so soon in the year (it’s still technically spring!).

Thankfully, we have plenty of homebrewed beer around to refresh our dry palates and cool down a bit.  These are my tasting notes of the American Pale Ale that I brewed up in March.

Appearance:  Copper hued.  I feel I hit the color of a pale ale spot on.  The clarity needs a bit of work.  I have some chill haze, so I am thinking I will need to use some finings to clear it up next time.  Nice white creamy head with good lacing throughout.

Aroma: A present hop aroma but not strong.  The glacier hops have a less citrusy aroma than the other American hops varieties, they are more earthy with some fruit notes.  Some biscuit and malt tones too.

Taste: Pleasant hop bitterness.  Not harsh at all or overwhelming but balanced with the malts which is now being dominated by the Victory malt profile with some hints of the Honey and Special B malts.  Good carbonation with a clean finish.

Overall Impressions:  I think this beer does the trick on a hot summer evening.  I will append the competition notes to this post when I receive them.  Maybe next time I will not use any Caramel malt (60L) and just rock the Honey and Special B.

 Here is the American Pale Ale recipe.

Since I have only done one partial mash in the past, I thought I would brush up on the technique. Here are my top 10 points I can pass on to would be partial mashers:

1. Get your hands on the October 2006 issue of BYO magazine. It has a great article on countertop partial mashing.
2. I bought a picnic cooler to mash in. You don’t need one, but it helps to keep the temperature of your mash steady.
3. I haven’t modified the cooler to make it easy to separate the wort from the grain like a false bottom or a manifold, so I am just going to use a grain bag. I am going to keep the bag as loose as possible to ensure I get a good soak.
4. There are a few different ratios of hot water to grain out there. I am going to use Chris Colby’s 1.375 quarts to every pound of grain.
5. I know I should heat up more water than I need and I should heat it 11-15 degrees hotter than my mash temperature.
6. After mashing for an hour, I will open the spigot and let the wort drain into a large pitcher. Then I will pour it back over the grains to recirculate it since the first runnings are cloudy and probably full of husks.
7. Then, I will drain the cooler into my pitcher again until all the sweet, sweet wort has flowed out of the cooler
8. I will then pour the wort gently into my brew pot.
9. After draining the cooler, I will fill it up again with water that will settle to 170 F and I will let it sit there for 5 minutes and then drain it again.
10. Not sure how much water I will need to add to the wort to get to total of 6 gallons to brew (I will need 6 gallons for the boil to end up with 5 gallons in the fermenter), but that amount is what I will put in my kettle.

If I think of other partial mashing tips, I will post them. I probably will have a bunch after my brew sessions.

All right. I think I gotta brew a batch for the Sam Adams Comp. I came up with this American Pale Ale recipe:

4 lbs. 4 oz. American 2-row
2 oz. American Caramel 60°L
4 oz. American Victory
3 oz. Honey Malt
3 oz. Special B Malt
3.5 lbs. Dry Extra Light Extract
.5 oz. Cluster (Pellets, 5.50 %AA) boiled 60 min.
.5 oz. Glacier (Plugs, 7.0 %AA) boiled 60 min.
.5 oz. Glacier (Plugs, 7.0 %AA) boiled 30 min.
.5 oz. Glacier (Plugs, 7.0 %AA) boiled 15 min.
.5 oz. Glacier (Plugs, 7.0 %AA) boiled 1 min.
Yeast: White Labs WLP051 California Ale V Yeast

Original Gravity: 1.054
Terminal Gravity: 1.012
Color: 8.51 °SRM
Bitterness: 37.5 IBU
Alcohol (%volume): 5.50%

If you look closely at the ingredients list, you will see that I have profiled many of them in recent posts. I may need to alter some of the ingredients if I can’t get them.

I will be following a partial mash procedure for this recipe. Here is my brew log for this beer:

American Pale Ale Preparations

Checking On The Hops

Checking On The Grains

APA Brew Day

Getting a Better Bottle carboy would allow me to lager a beer.  I have plans to brew a cream ale in February or March and lager it through the cold months using:

• A styrofoam box that I got from Mike…looks like it was used for Omaha steaks
• Snow and/or ice from the outside
• If there isn’t any snow or ice outside, I will freeze half liter water bottles and use them

I think that I can regulate temperature just enough without freezing the beer.  Without a spare fridge, I am willing to give this makeshift ice box a try.

I ordered this yesterday from morebeer.com.  I have done a fair amount of ordering fom these guys in the past and I am usually pretty pleased.  The customer service is generally quite good on technical issues and order issues.   I’ll track how long the order takes to get from West Coast to East Coast.

I also ordered a new high pressure gauge for my CO2 regulator.  I knocked over the tank when moving the fridge and smashed it.  The regulator still works fine but I can’t tell how much gas is in the tank anymore.  I also ordered a regulator cage to protect the gauges for the next time I knock it over.  I’ll post pics of the replacement procedure once the gauge and cage show up with the oxygentation setup.

 Happy Brewing!!

Now that I have a propane cooker, I need to get some other equipment. The most important item is a wort chiller. Since I will be brewing a larger volume of wort, I need something that will cool this larger volume from just under boiling temperatures to fermentation temperatures (around 70 degrees).

When you first start out brewing your own beer, you boil a concentrated wort that ranges from 1 to 2 gallons for recipes that make 5 gallons of beer. After you are done boiling it, you add it to your fermentation vessel with enough plain ol’ water to make 5 gallons. As you probably can guess, it’s a lot easier and quicker to cool 1 to 2 gallons of almost boiling wort to 70 degrees. I would take my boiling pot and let it sit in my kitchen sink in an ice bath for about 10 minutes. While the pot was sitting there, I would take 3+ gallons of spring water that were cooled in the fridge and pour them into my fermantation bucket. Pouring my wort into this cool water always brought the wort to a temp where I could put my yeast in and not be afraid of killing the little guys.

Why do you need to cool the wort quickly? Well, the faster you can get the wort into the fermentation vessel (just fancy talk for bucket), introduce yeast, and seal it up, the less chance there is for wild yeast to get into your wort and make it taste funky. Quick cooling means more control over the final taste of the beer.

After some research, More Beer looks like it’s the place for me to buy this piece of equipment. The free shipping offer on orders over 59 bucks is the biggest reason I am ordering from this site.

Here’s a photo of the one I want:

I have some other items I want to buy too. Once I get a moment to order it, I will let you know how the experience is.

Here’s a post about getting my wort chiller.