Pale Ale

by Bob Jones

Happy New Year fellow brewers! Charlie ask me to cough up the recipe for a Pale Ale I brewed about 2 years ago. Some of you might remember it. I made it right after a trip to England. I brought back several yeast cultures and one of them was from the famous Samuel Smith’s brewery in Tadcaster. I used this yeast to make this beer and dispensed it at the club Christmas party on the newly invented pseudo beer engine. The beer was a smash success. It was bang on to the styles and flavors very fresh in my memory. Everyone else must have liked to, it was gone in about 2 hours, if I remember.

So I looked the beer up in my notes and was a bit surprised to find such a boring recipe. I almost decided not to submit the recipe for the newsletter. After a bit of thought, I decided to write up the recipe and then speculate on why it was perceived as such a good beer.

First the recipe….

Batch size =10 gallons

17# GW pale malt

½ # Wheat malt

¾ # HB Crystal malt (80L)

1T - Irish moss

2 oz CFJ90 hops (AA% 10.9)

16 gr Gypsum (10 gm in mash, balance in kettle)

2 gr salt (kettle)

10 gr Epsom salt (kettle)

Sparge pH adjusted with lactic acid to 5.1

Isinglass fining

Samuel Smith’s yeast culture

Mash grains at 154 ºF for 90 minutes with 10 gm gypsum. 1 ¾ oz hops, boiled for 80 minutes. ¼ oz hops, boiled for 50 minutes. Irish moss in the last 15 minutes of boil. Total boil time is 90 minutes.

Final water: Ca = 105 ppm

SO₄ = 344 ppm

Mg = 26 ppm

Cl = 33 ppm

Na = 23 ppm

OG = 1047, FG = 1017

The beer is served with little to no CO₂ via pseudo beer engine.

Well as you can see the above recipe is pretty unspectacular except for the minerals, the yeast and the serving method. In fact the CFJ90 hops are a cousin of Cascades and not even close to true British hops. So what’s the big deal??? I suspect the yeast, mineral additions and the serving method are the reason the beer turned out so well.

The lesson, if there is one, is that sometimes the smallest things can have profound effects on the final quality of a beer. Deviating from the traditional hops used in English beers didn’t have much of an effect of the overall success of this beer. The yeast provided the Sam Smith flavor and the minerals provided a dry finish on the palate. The pseudo beer engine whipped oxygen into the beer and built this magnificent creamy head.

So if you have a particular beer style in mind, but don’t have the traditional ingredients on hand, go for it! Maybe your beer will turn out spectacular and you’ll be on your way to creating a new beer style.

Happy Brew Year!