Kegging and Tasting Wright's Red

I kegged my Irish red ale from a few weeks ago, after 5 days in secondary it had cleared nicely. Since it was a beer for my dad's  birthday I felt the need to embellish the classic style a bit, so  I decided to add some Irish whiskey before kegging.  

I made some different dilutions of the whiskey in some small tasting glasses, starting with the maximum amount I could add (equivalent to 750 mL bottle of booze to the 5.75 gallons of beer).  I was shooting for some subtle vanilla, woody, sherry flavors without a strong whiskey bite in the finish.  From this first dilution I got nice flavors, that I wanted but I also got a lingering alcohol in the finish.  

I tried dilutions that would scale to 3/4 and 1/2 of the 750 mL bottle to 5.75 gallons as well. The 3/4 was just about perfect.  Nice woody flavors without noticeable strong alcohol.  The flavors got lost in the 1/2 bottle dilution.  I couldn't pick out any whiskey flavors.  Set on the 3/4 dilution I added a little more than half of the whiskey to the beer, stirred gently preventing as much oxidation as possible, and tasted it just to make sure the flavors were coming through but not too strong.  It seemed a bit weak so I added some more and tasted.  I ended up adding a little more than 3/4 of the 750 mL before I was satisfied.   

I served this beer at a claybeer and burrito's beer utilization and reduction party (I needed to empty some kegs so I can keg my Cherale Summer Ale).  I had everyone from my lab over, most of whom had never had any of my beer before.  The beer went over really well, the 3 gallons I had kegged were gone by the end of the night. I can't wait to bottle up the rest and take it home to my dad.  Hopefully he'll enjoy it as much as they did.  I was also serving my Cranberry Oatmeal Brown Ale, which wasn't quite as popular.  It's much heavier, not quite as drinkable and palette friendly.  Still very good but I think next year I will dry it out a bit more and go with some fruit other than cranberries, as they can be overpowering.   

Wright Red

My Dad's favorite beer is an Irish red.  I haven't brewed one before, and haven't done much research on recipes so I turned to one of my favorite podcasts, The Jamil Show on The Brewing Network.  For the most part I stuck to Jamil's recipe.  I decided to go with extract since I haven't brewed in a while and still need to do some more experimenting with my mash tun to get my strike water calculations right, but more on that in future posts.  My Dad likes his Irish red's clean and dry with, a hint of caramel and roast.  To make sure I got a nice drinkable light product, I decided to substitute 0.5 lbs of malt extract for corn sugar (might go with demera next time, but I had a bunch of corn sugar in the cabinet).  To get the right balance of red color, roast, and caramel I stuck with Jamil's 6 ozs each of 40L, 120L, and roasted barley.  Hops, 0.5 ozs challenger, classic english bittering.  It tasted like I was expecting going into the fermenter, maybe a little lighter than I expected, and I hit my original gravity spot-on.  The best part about this brew day was definitely getting to try my new immersion chiller 25' of 3/8" copper tubing connected to my faucet (thanks to the faucet to hose adapter from Maryland Homebrew).  It cooled my full 5.5 gal of wort to 68 F in about 45 min.  Much faster than my previous 20' of 1/4" fed by gravity.  The best part was that my sink is about 5' from my washer so I just ran the water directly from the sink through the beer and into a load of laundry, excellently green.  I will post the full recipe for this beer when I have some more time to play with Homebrew Formulator and figure out an easy way to export my recipes as text.  

Cheers, 

Clay