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