English Brown Ale
Review of Brown Eagle - English Brown Ale
Name: Brown Eagle
Brewery: www.brew-beer-home.com
Type of beer: English Brown Ale
Alcohol vol%: 5.0
Review: This beer have a dark brown color. The brown ale have a nice, almost sparkling head, that gives the drinker a fizzy feeling when drinking it. The beer has a characteristic caramel aroma from the mix of malts used. The beer has a nice caramel flavor with a somewhat "metal like" notes. The beer is best served at 10-12 celcius. This is a beer that is drinkable for most people - from the novice to the experienced beerdrinker.
Additional information: I put plenty of cane sugar in the beer, when I carbonated it, to make it a sparkling beer, but it tends to over-carbonate. If it shall be brewed again, it is advisable to use less sugar for carbonation, than described in the recipe.
Brown Ale
Description of a Brown Ale
The beer type Brown Ale comes in two traditional variations. You have the English and the American Brown Ale. The American Brown Ales originates from the English Brown Ale. Special malts are more often used in the American Brown Ale, and they tend to have more alcohol in them. American hops are often used in American Brown Ales, but English hops might be present as well. A Brown Ale is characterized by its use of caramel malts, that gives the beer a darker taste of caramel and even chocolate notes can occur. These malts gives the beer its distinctive dark copper to red-brown color and malty taste. The hops, used for brewing Brown Ale, gives the beer a mild to medium bitternes, and a delicate citrusy taste to underline the remarkable strong malty taste.
Target Values for a Brown Ale
When brewing a Brown Ale, you must be within the values in the style guide you see below. These are your target values when you are designing a recipe. However, as a home brewer you decide if you want to make the beer sweeter, with more alcohol, more bitterness or whatever you think will make the beer better.
Original Gravity (OG): 1.040 - 1.050
Final Gravity (FG): 1.010 - 1.017
Color (EBC): 40 - 60
Bitterness (IBU): 25 - 60
Alcohol (Vol%): 5.0 - 6.0
Basic Brown Ale recipe
I have made a simple Brown Ale recipe for you. The amount of ingredients in the recipe is for one liter of water. This means, that if you have 30 liters of water in your kettle, then you must multiply with 30.
Ingredients:
Pilsner Malt (3 EBC): 160 grams/liter
Cara Crystal Malt (120 EBC): 60 grams/liter
Cara Aroma Malt (350 EBC): 30 grams/liter
Demerera Sugar (80 EBC): 10 grams/liter
Chinook hops (12.6 Alpha%): 1 gram/liter
Ahtanum hops (5.8 Alpha%): 3 gram/liter
Yeast: You can pick any yeast suitable for ale
Brewing a Brown Ale:
Heat the water to 64 °C and add all the malt
Stir and maintain the temperature at 64 °C for 60 minutes
Raise the temperature to 74 °C and keep it at 74 °C for 20 minutes
Seperate the mash from the wort with your strainer
Sparge the mash with 74 °C water untill you have the equivalent volume of wort in the kettle as you had water to begin with (1 liter in this case)
Raise the temperature to 100 °C - boiling
The total boiling time is 60 minutes from you add the first wort to you begin cooling the wort
First add 0.6 gram/liter Chinook for 60 minutes total boil time
Then add 0.4 gram/liter Chinook for 45 minutes total boil time
Then add 1 gram/liter Ahtanum for 30 minutes total boil time
Then add 1 gram/liter Ahtanum for 15 minutes total boil time
Then add 1 gram/liter Ahtanum for 1 minute total boil time
After 60 minutes of hopping the beer, start chilling the wort
When the wort is at fermentation temperature, pour it to the sanitized fermenter bucket
Add the yeast and keep the fermenter bucket at fermentation temperature
When the fermentation has stopped, transfer the beer to a sanitized fermenter bucket for secondary fermentation
Add sugar to carbonate the beer to get the desired CO2 pressure, and then bottle the beer
Values for this Brown Ale
OG: 1056
FG: 1014
Color (EBC): 60
Bitterness (IBU): 48
Alcohol (Vol%): 5.5
These values are within the limits of the target values of a Brown Ale.
Review of Bruin - Brown Ale
Name: Bruin
Brewery: Jefferson Brewery (Ørbæk)
Country: Denmark
Type of beer: Brown Ale
Alcohol vol%: 5.5
Review: Bruin is light brown, almost red, with a white and vey foamy head. It has a nice aroma of hops and nuts, and a sort of citrus note. The beer has a nutty and caramel taste and it is very malty with a good bitterness at the end. However the taste is not durable. 10 seconds after your last sip the taste has completely disappeared. It must be served at about 8-10 celcius to get the most of the flavour and aroma of this brown ale. This is a beer to enjoy in your garden on a hot summer day, and perhaps to your sandwich at lunchtime. This is a beer for everyone to drink - from the experienced beer drinker to the beginner. A beer that is drinkable, but there is not much more to say about it - you drink it, enjoys it and forgets it!
Brown Eagle - English Brown Ale
Production date - 30/04/11
The ingredients;
50 liter water
6,7 kg Pale Ale malt - EBC 8
1,4 kg Cara Crystal - EBC 120
2,0 kg Aroma malt - EBC 150
50 g Northdown 8,4%
50 g Fuggle 4,0%
S-04 yeast
The data for this beer is;
Alcohol (Vol%): 5.0
Colour (EBC): 39
Bitterness (IBU): 22
BU/GU ratio: 0.44
Original Gravity (OG): 1050
Final Gravity (FG): 1012
The brewing process;
Heating the water
Mashing, Lautering and Sparging - Mashing 90 minutes – Mashout 30 minutes
Boiling - 60 minutes from start to end
Chilling, Measure OG and Fermentation
Measure FG, Carbonate and Bottling
Carbonation, Labeling, Storing and Drinking
Types of Beer You Can Brew at Home
Furthermore I have made a basic recipe for every type of beer. These recipes are meant as basic recipes for the reader to add more to. This way you learn from your own experienced, and that is essentialy what makes a great craft brewer.
