I’ve always wanted to do this one, but after Cat’s party where everyone looooved it soooo much, it got moved up in the schedule. It doesn’t even use one of the million kits that I stocked up on when they were $8 at the supermarket. And hey, after the failure of my Raspberry Lemonade, I need something to get my confidence back.
Date of brewing: 25/7/06
Date of bottling: 11/8/06
Ingredients:
- 1 Coopers Canadian Blonde kit
- 1kg light dry malt extract (instead of the liquid pale asked for in the recipe)
- 250g Crystal Malt
- 500g Clover Honey (from the market; thanks Cat)
- 250g Maple Syrup. Expensive stuff this at like $7.50
- 20g Cascade, 20 mins
- 28g Saaz, 1 min
Method:
OK, I pretty much followed Dogger Dan’s recipe and method, but I’ll expand on my own mistakes here. I only have a small pot so the boil size was much smaller. Added the LDME to 2 or 3 L of water, boiled while I put the Crystal into a coffee plunger. It’s a 1L coffee plunger and the 250g of Crystal fills it up 2/3 of the way. Added boiled water to the the Crystal, mixed, plunged, and added the resulting amber liquid to the boil. Repeated 4 or 5 times. Added the honey. After an hour of the boil (after which time enough water had evaporated for me to fit more stuff in the pot), I added the Cascade, and boiled for 20 minutes while I watched Miss Universe which Frosty had on on the TV and drank a couple of bottles of homebrew with him (numbers 2 and 3… 2 is still crap while I’m liking 3 more and more). After 20 mins, added the Saaz and maple syrup, boiled for 1 more minute, then took off the heat.
Tried to filter the wort into the fermenter through my square of cloth inside a sieve, but after 10 minutes of it slowly trickling through I removed the cloth and just used the sieve. It still caught most of the hops anyway. Added the cold water using my usual technique of pouring it out of a jug from a great height, through my sieve into the fermenter (to aerate it). Meanwhile in Miss Universe, the crowd favorite (and Frosty’s and my Favorite), Japan was beaten for the title of miss universe by… Paraguay I think it was. The names that we had made up for her earlier in the competition were: “Freakshow” “Skeletor” and “Mars Attacks”. Now we know that Miss Universe technically covers the whole universe, but come on, Japan was so cool and her samaurai national outfit was just soooo sexy. It’s just wrong. I’m sad that Frosty was right in that they only ever give the title to “White or Olive people”. It’s not even like she’d be a bad ambassador, being able to speak French and English as well as Japanese. Fuck you, Donald Trump.
Anyway, I just got so caught up in the whole travesty of the affair. So I pitch the yeast fit the airlock (before putting the lid on so I don’t lose the grommet in the wort again), and get ready to put the fermenter onto the footwarmer… and I have one of those “oh shit” moments. If you’ve been paying attention here, you might be able to work out what I neglected to add to the brew… yup the kit. So hehe I add the kit… brings it up to a bit less than 24L, no biggie. Stir the hell out of it using my food grade paddle, and that’s it!
Numbers:
Specific gravity 25/7: 1.049 @ 18°C
Racked on 30/7. Specific gravity: 1.012 @ 18°C
Bottled on 11/8. Specific gravity: 1.007
