Bottling Day: Irish Red Ale (Old Red)

In preparation for St. Patrick's day, Maureen suggested that I brew a green beer. To make things even more Irish, I chose an Irish Red Ale. It's a little dark, but I think the green will come out. Either way, it'll definitely be visible in the head. Check out my bottling day below.

Here's the Irish Red Ale fermenting in the tub. It went for two weeks (2/26/11-3/14/11) with a pretty mellow fermentation. Not a lot of krausen (foam).

Moved it to the garage for bottling. The mess I'll make is easier to clean up here.

Let the cleaning begin! In front we have an 8 gallon kettle for cleaning bottles, and 6 gallon bucket for cleaning equipment. The bucket will double as the beer bucket when I go to bottle. A carboy is in the background (it was a leftover from last weekend).

A little peak at the recipe, complete with notes. Just the standard Irish Red Ale recipe from More Beer.

Before I start moving the beer from the carboy (big plastic bottle) to the bucket, I need to prep the extra simple sugar that I need to add. It's 4 ounces of corn sugar and 2 cups of water. Later, I'll boil it for two minutes, and add it to the beer. Once the beer is bottled, the yeast will consume the corn sugar, and release CO2, which will create a great head.

Time out. Benny wants to play.

Back to work. Here, I'm transferring the beer from the carboy to the bottling bucket by siphoning the beer. By blowing into the little white UFO above the orange plug in the carboy, I can force beer to go through the tube, and into the bucket below.

I've begun to siphon here. You can see the bucket is starting to fill.

Minimizing exposure to bacteria is key, so I cover the bucket with some cheap saran wrap.

While the bucket is filling, I sneak a little bit of beer into a glass, so that I can experiment with my food coloring. The Irish Red Ale is so dark that it takes about 12 drops of green food coloring (per 12 ounces of beer) to get it to look green.

The bucket's full now. It looks like I boiled off a bit too much when I did the initial boil. Ideally I'd be closer to five gallons, but four will have to do.

Now it's time to bottle. I'm putting my bottling wand into a 22 ounce bottle, and pressing the spring loaded stopper at the bottom of the wand into the bottom of the bottle. This lets beer flow from the bucket into the bottle. After I fill the bottle, I drop in 24 drops of green food coloring, and cap it off.

Progress is being made. You can see my capper in the lower left corner (the red handled piece of metal). On the right are 10 bottles of Irish Red Ale (dyed green), and on the left there are 5 smaller bottles just in case the batch is good enough for competition. The kettle is for sanitizing the bottles before adding beer to them.

Here's a quick snapshot of the food coloring that I'm using. I had Maureen get three, but that turned out to be way too much. A single bottle was just about enough for the entire batch.

Success! Ten 22 ounce Irish Red Ales (dyed green), four 22 ounce (regular), six 12 ounce (for competition), and one 2 liter growler to bring to work for beer o'clock.

And of course, more cleanup. It's dark at this point, but at least it's not raining, and warm enough for a t-shirt and shorts.

And now to enjoy it. I saved the 12 ounce test glass from before, and now it's time to taste. Over all, not bad! No off flavors, that I can tell. Maybe slightly sweeter than it should be.


Notes
Ingredients:

• 7 lbs Light Malt Extract
• 1 lb Crystal 120L
• 8 oz Aromatic
• 8 oz Caramunich
• 2 oz Black Roasted
• 2 oz Special B

Hops:

• 1.5 oz Northern Brewer
• 2 oz Willamette

Tweaks:

• 45 minute steap instead of 30
• 20 extra minutes to bring to 200F
• Added extract
• 15 extra minutes to bring back to 200F

Brew Day:

• Gallons: 4
• Yeast: WLP004
• OG: 1.050
• FG: 1.020
• Temperature at pitching time: ~85F
• Temperature during fermentation: 63F-68F
• Days in primary fermenter: 2 weeks (2/26/11-3/14/11)
• ABV: 4%

Extra:

• FG is a bit high. Others were complaining about the More Beer WLP004 batch that I got, and said it died out at 1.020, so likely bad yeast. Someone suggested that I try a yeast starter next time, as well.
• Hop combination is great.
• Boiling 45m + 20m + 15m probably boiled off too much water during the initial boil, which led to the 4 gallons at bottling day. Should probably just break down and buy a propane heater.
• Beer came out pretty dark green, but there was some foam when I stirred, and that was bright green. Mouth didn't turn green. Number of drops seemed about right. Maybe if the steap is stopped at 30 minutes it wouldn't be quite as dark.