Odd pale beer

I woke up early this morning and since I'm recovering from a heavy cold and not planning to go anywhere, I thought I might as well get a brew on.

It's a simple recipe, all pale malt, as that's all I have left.

0.5kg Belgian pale
1.7kg Maris Otter

Mash at 67ºC
1/2 tsp gypsum in the mash.

Batch sparging at 72ºC
Forgot the gypsum.

Added another 1/2 tsp gypsum. Filled my brew pot, sparged too much so had to split over two pots. This eventually all boiled down enough that I could combine back into one pot.

Hops:
20g Northern Brewer 90min
10g Styrian Goldings 90min
8g Styrian Goldings 0min
8g Styrian Goldings -10min

OG was 1062, but I think this might be a bit off as there's a fair bit of crud in the sample glass.

I don't know how to classify this. If I'd used C-hops it would be run of the mill american pale ale, but I used Styrians and Northern Brewer.

It's pretty odd brewing when you have no sense of smell. I hope it turns out all right.

Mint Beer and APA (A Pale Ale)

I've just bottled my APA and mint beer, and both are tasting quite promising. The mint beer is intensely minty, more so than I expected. The APA is not hoppy enough, and a bit on the sweet and heavy side. Perhaps I am mashing too hot.

And no mould! I shall add bleach to my cleaning routine every time in future.

New brews

Last night a friend came round to drink beer and help me brew some more. I now have a load of empty bottles and a batch of K in the fermenter. I was about to post a picture, but to be honest it looks just like any other plastic carboy with beer in it.

Just now I'm bringing the wort up to boil for a batch of Pale Beer. Because I'm a manky bastard, and just to see the effect, I am re-using the hops from last night. There were a lot of late hops in last night's brew, so I'm hoping to get enough unused alpha acid out of them to bitter today's beer. It doesn't need too much bittering because it's a low-gravity brew and the addition of some Bramling Cross for aroma near the end should be all it needs. In fact, I've just tasted the wort, it's only just come to the boil and is already nicely bitter. The reason for a low-gravity one is that I'm hoping to be able to bottle this after Christmas and be drinking it at New Year, but this may be over-optimistic; it depends if it carbonates in time. I rather suspect it won't.

After Christmas, once these two are bottled, I'm now planning to brew an X, which will be a low-gravity ale with a bit of crystal malt and sugar, and a Brown Beer, which will basically be X with more hops.