Amarillo Pale Ale

[bkmad]

This is a half batch I did recently, my second crack at doing a partial. Its only a half batch due to my limited equipment.

1kg light DME
1kg Pale Malt (assumed 65% efficiency for 60min mash)
0.1kg crystal malt (in the mash)
0.25kg Dextrose
60 min boil
20gm Amarillo for 60 min (9.5%AA)
10gm Amarillo for 30 min (9.5%AA)
20gm Amarillo for 1 min (9.5%AA)
Saf US yeast

It's not a bad drop - pretty heavy on the floral hop aroma.
If I did it again I'd probably put in another flavour hop addition at say 10gm at 10min as it could do with a bit more flavour. I'd probably mix up the hops with some cascade too.

Anyway, this would be an easy intro to partial mashing as I only used equipment common in most kitchens.

Cheers
BK

[tcc]

hey bk, what volume did you make it up to?

and did you manage to measure the actual efficiency? i attempted my first partial a few weeks ago using a grain bag and esky and got a very poor 43.5%... temps were ok so i think it was related to pH and too little water

[bkmad]

oops, the volume would help! I made it up to 12L.
I didn't get around to trying to work out efficiency. I probably will for my next brew.

I just mashed in a SS pot with a towel wraped around it. I added about 0.5L of boiling water about half way through the mash to raise the temp a bit as it dropped due to insufficient insulation. Then I strained the wort through a collander and then sparged through this grain bed until I had enough wort. I don't think it was great efficiency, but I reckon it was probably around 60-65% I assumed in beersmith. The OG and FG certainly came close to what beersmith predicted so my efficiency must have been close.

At a guess, I would say your low efficiency my have been due to not enough sparging water. As far as I understand it, the more you sparge, the more malt you extract - I could be very wrong on this though.
Cheers
BK

[tcc]

yeah looking over things, I think Palmer recommends for mashing approximately 2.5-3L per kilo of grain (he uses quarts and pounds so I may not have converted perfectly...) and I had 2.75kg grain with 6L

good to hear you got decent efficiency with a basic setup, gives me some hope