Brew Day: (Cranberry?) Cream Ale

This was originally planned as a festival beer. The cranberry was supposed to be the draw. Well, we all know how that turned out, but I opted to go ahead with the brew, and may or may not add the cranberry to it. We'll see.

7 lbs Domestic 2-row
2 lbs Vienna
8 oz Crystal 15°L
8 oz Carapils
2 oz Maltodextrine
1 oz Tradition (5.8%) @60min
1 oz Liberty (4.5%) @5min
Fermentis Safale US-05
Mashed 75 min @150°F

And, if the spirit moves me... some frozen or dried cranberries in the secondary (not exactly the season for fresh), and 4 oz cranberry extract at kegging.

I was originally targeting a higher mash temp, closer to 154°F, but I've had problems overshooting in the past, so I was a little more cautious this time. It seems to have worked against me, however, and I wound up with a mash of around 146°F. So I added and added and added hot water, near boiling, and got to maybe 150°F. Maybe for the best... should be a little more fermentable, maybe balance well with the maltodextring sweetening it up.

I also currently have a bit of a conundrum in transferring the wort into the fermentor. I have a simple, copper imersion chiller, and over Christmas added a ball valve and diverter tube to my kettle. The ball valve so I could finally transfer into a carboy for primary (rather than pour the wort into a plastic bucket), and the diverter to pull wort from the side of the kettle and avoid trub in the fermentor. Well, the immersion chiller makes a neat little pile of trub in the center of the kettle difficult. So does the diverter, for that matter, disturbing the whirlpool. The end result was more trub in the fermenter than I would have liked.

As it happened, I listened to the Basic Brewing Radio on a trub-in-the-fermentor experiment the next day. Had I listened to it beforehand, I mightn't have worried so much. At any rate, fermentation took off overnight (between 8 and 16 hours later), and she's bubbling happily away. We'll see how it turns out. O.G. was 1.058.