Raspberry Ale Brew Day 2017

My wife likes raspberry beers - her favorite beer is Realignment from Oddside Ales. Last year the guys over at Webrews made a raspberry ale, so I asked and got the recipe. I made a 1 gal batch if this for my wife to try and you can check out the video review here.

We both liked this beer a lot, you can really taste the raspberries in it. The only problem that I saw in this test batch was the ABV. The ABV was around 8.5%. So when scaling the recipe this year I wanted to bring down the ABV some. I did let Beersmith scale it, but I didn’t add in as much honey as what the scaled recipe called for.

Here is the recipe that I used:

2-Row 80.2%

White Wheat Malt 6.7%

Crystal 20L 3.3%

.5 oz Cascade @ 60mins

.5 oz Cascade @ 5 mins

Whirlfloc @ 15 mins

1 lb 7.5oz Honey Flame out( I only added 1 lb)

US-05 yeast

If you checked out my Blog post for the 1st brew day of 2017 you will know that I had some equipment upgrades over the winter and I got most of them in place and working for the 1st brew day of 2017. Before the raspberry brew day, I did order some more parts that I was missing and got them installed. The brew day went well, but there are some things I still need to work on. For the mash in water on this one I did take the water up to 170 for a 154 mash rest. I did this because on the pecan brew day my mash in water was way too low. I think once I pumped the water into my mash tun I was at 145 and I needed to be 152. I did not want to have to heat up more water on the raspberry brew day, so by the time I was done pumping the mash in water into the mash tun with the grains I was at 161. So I had to use a lot of ice to get the temp down. Using the new pump and wort chiller I'm still not getting as much wort into the carboy. On the raspberry brew day I still ended up with 5 gals going into the carboy. I should have about 5.5 to 6 gals going in so that way when I transfer it into the keg we have 5 gallons to drink.

I only used 1 lb of honey at the end of the boil and not the 1 lb 7.5 oz that Beersmith called for. I know in talking to the Webrew guys they used the honey to fight off bugs that might be in the raspberries. I wanted to use the honey as that's what I used in the test batch.

Brew day is finished and the yeast is working on this beer now. I will let the yeast work for 2 weeks the I will add almost 7.5 LBS of raspberries to it for a week then keg it.

Here is my brew day video for the Raspberry Ale.

Until next time, Happy Brewing!