Citra Pale Ale: Brew Day

MoreBeer.com had their recipe kits on sale a few weeks back and I grabbed a few, thinking it would be a good way to get back into my favorite hobby after a months long lapse. Today I brewed the Citra Pale Ale all grain kit.

The grain bill was 2-row pale base malt, plus some light crystal, cara-pils, and white wheat malt. Add to that a little Magnum hops for bittering, plus tons of Citra for flavor, aroma, and dry hopping. Given that I'm not really looking for yeast character with a beer like this, I opted for a simple dry yeast, Safale US-05.

The brew day started out slow. When I went to HyVee for water, I dropped into their liquor store for curiosity's sake, trying to find a bottle of this year's Utopias. Turns out Andrew, the Assistant Manager there, had purchased their only bottle for himself about a week earlier. He was a great guy though, and admitted that this made him feel like "kind of a dick."

That said, he called around and managed to track down a bottle for me at Broadway Liquors in Pekin. So off we went for a $200 bottle of beer. And now I have one of only 4 or 5 bottles of Utopias seen in Peoria in 2011. Totally worth a delay in brew day.

But I digress. Back to the brew. I targeted a single infusion mash temperature of 152°, using a calculator on my phone to figure the temperature of the strike water. In spite of my calculations, the mash seemed to settle around 160° by 10 minutes after mash-in. I tossed in a handful of ice cubes to try and bring it down, which seemed to work at first, but I soon found myself with a mash temp of 148°. Rather than play with it further, I decided to just roll with it and increase my mash time to a full 90 minutes. This will probably make my wort more fermentable and give me a drier finish on the final beer. We'll see.

Second fiasco came with an empty propane tank just after sparging. Not a big deal, just another delay. It really couldn't have come a better time in the process. If I'd already had a boil rolling with hops, the whole flavor profile could have been thrown off. But the beer made it into the fermenter, and the fermenter made it into the fridge (this is also the inaugural brew for my temp-controlled fridge turned fermentation chamber), so it was a good day.