This is a brewing blog . . . and finally, I have some brewing to blog about!

On Sunday, I brewed 10 gallons of pale ale. I decided to make 10 gallons, instead of my usual 5, because I was low on homebrew. Also, I had just bought a 15-gallon demijohn and two 10-gallon Corny kegs last year, and I wanted to use them.

The brew was basically my usual pale ale. I called it Patrick Henry Pale Ale in the March-April 2006 issue of BYO, where the 5-gallon recipe appeared. It won a medal in the balanced beer category of my club's competition (the Austin ZEALOTS Homebrew Inquisition) last year. That time around, I called it Pretzel vs. President Pale Ale. This time around, since I've been watching the cartoon Metalocalypse -- the cartoon about the death metal band Dëthkløk -- quite a bit recently, I decided to call it "Give Me Liberty or Give Me Deth." I'll list the recipe, as I brewed it this time, at the end of this entry.

I squeezed the grains for the mash into my 10-gallon mash tun, but didn't have room to add boiling water for a mash-out. So I sparged with 190 °F water until the grain bed temperature rose to 170 °F, then dropped the temp of the sparge water to 170 °F. I ran the whole wort off in a little over an hour - a bit faster than I usually go. I boiled for 75 minutes in my 15-gallon converted keg and chilled the wort with my immersion chiller. I used six bags of ice in my two "pre-chillers" as my tap water is around 75 °F.

I am using my 15-gallon demijohn as the fermenter. Once the wort was cool, I rehydrated the dried yeast, aerated with oxygen for 2 minutes and the beer was fermenting the next morning. My temperature control is just a wet T-shirt, and I may be running a bit hot, but the "California ale" strain is, in my experience, a good yeast strain that still produces fairly clean beer at higher temps provided your pitching rate and aeration were sufficient.

The beer is bubbling away happily right now. Here's the recipe.

Give Me Liberty or Give Me Deth
(10 gallons, all-grain)

Ingredients
20 lbs. 2-row pale malt (Briess)
1.0 lb. crystal malt (40 °L)
4.0 oz. crystal malt (60 °L)
12 AAU Chinook hops (60 mins)
(1.0 oz. at 12% alpha acids)
12 AAU Simcoe hops (60 mins)
(1.0 oz. at 12% alpha acids)
18 AAU Centennial hops (15 mins)
(2.0 oz. at 8.8% alpha acids)
1.0 oz. Cascade hops (0 mins)
1.0 oz. Amarillo hops (0 mins)
2 pkgs Fermentis US-05 dried yeast
dry hops yet to be decided

Mash
Combined 15 gallons distilled water with 4 gallons of tap water (ran through my carbon filter) and 9 tsp of gypsum. 153 °F for 60 minutes. Boil 75 minutes. Ferment at 72 °F.