Homage to Lucas

By Stew Horne

Recipe is part of Recipe Index

BJCP 2021 Style 19A American Amber Ale

The inspiration for this recipe came from Lucas who gave me his American Brown recipe. I didn't have the same darker malts so I made do with what I had in my specialty grain box to get close, and I had a bunch of old school C hops that needed using plus some t45 hops that came free from Brewcon. So its called homage to Lukas because its loosely based on his American Brown (but lighter) and because that man is a legend!

If I rebrewed this ….

• I’d rebalance the beer a bit to enhance the hop aroma, the malt profile hid this a bit so I’d dial this back a bit, either by swapping out Windsor for a better attenuating yeast
• I’d use a softer water profile – I couldn’t use my RO set up for this beer so I had to make do with the local hard water
• I wouldn't leave the beer on the hops as long as I did this last time (oops) but the t45s have much less vegetal matter so there wasn't too much grassiness in the beer - would have been pretty grassy if I had used whole hops!

Awards

ACB Homebrew Competition 2022 (Colchester, Essex)

1st - American beers

Statistics

• IBU 33
• ABV 4.4%
• OG 1.056
• FG 1.023
• 12 litres into fermenter.

Ingredients

Water

Final water profile:

• 80ppm Ca, 30ppm Mg, 39ppm Na, 156ppm SO4, 57ppm Cl

Malt

• Pale Ale malt (Pop’s pale ale malt, Crafty Maltsters Fife) 5.4 EBC, 2.125g,
• Caramalt 29.5 EBC 400g,
• Pale Crystal 60 EBC, 100g,
• Dark Crystal 240 EBC, 85g
• Double Roast Crystal 300 EBC 50g

Hops

• Columbus 10g at 30 minutes
• Chinook 9g at 5 minutes
• Columbus 11g at 5 minutes
• Jester T45 50g dry hop in keg for 10 weeks (!! I know)

Yeast

• Windsor – second pitch onto previous yeast cake

Process

Mash

• Mash Infusion mash 66C for 60 mins – BIAB

Boil

• Boil – 75mins

Ferment

• Ferment – at 18C
• Dry hopped in keg (accidently left in keg for 10 weeks whilst I moved house – ambient early spring garage temp so around 10C daytime mostly)

Serving

• Serving – closed transfer from keg to serving keg set at 20PSI