Wednesday, August 25, 2010

Recipe: Blackberry Ale

I just ordered the ingredients to brew my first fruit beer. Since we have an abundance of blackberries in the garden, I decided to try a blackberry ale. It's relatively lightly hopped to allow the blackberry to come through. I brew extract beer, so that's what the recipe calls for. I hope this will be a nice fall beer.

Here's the plan so far (comments welcome - I won't brew this for at least another week):

Grain / Fermentables:
  • 1 lb Caramel 10L
  • 1/4 lb Victory malt
  • 6 lb Briess Gold Liquid Malt extract
  • 1 lb honey
  • 5 lb blackberries (fresh frozen, thawed, then crushed)
Hops:
  • 1 oz Cascade @ 60 min
  • 1 oz Cascade @ 5 min
Yeast:
  • Wyeast Irish Ale 1084

Instructions:
Steep grains in 2-3 gal water for 30 minutes at 155F. Remove pot from burner. Add malt extract while stirring. Bring wort to a boil and add first oz of hops. With 5 minutes left of 60 minute boil, add the second oz of hops. Remove pot from boil and add crushed blackberries and honey. After 15 minutes, poor into sterilized fermentation bucket. Aerate wort. Add yeast, and ferment at 70F for 7-10 days. Rack to secondary for 2-3 weeks. I'm still considering dry hopping with some of the hops from the garden (will have to taste it to see if that makes sense).

According to Beer Calculus, this should give:
O.G. 1.052-1.061
F.G. 1.014-1.017
Color: 7ยบ SRM
Bitterness: 21.2 IBU
Alcohol: 5.6% ABV, 192 cal/12 oz