CC Pale Ale -- Brew Day + Recipe

*The Cs stand for Coffee and Cascade.

A cool day appeared on the horizon. I took inventory and realized I needed to make some more beer. The next recipe I had in mind involved combining beer with some home roasted coffee... so I decided to make a coffee pale ale.

When designing my recipe, I had to ensure that I would have enough volume in my mash tun. Hence, why the recipe for this batch is scaled to 7.5 gallons. This was a pretty simply recipe; majority of grain bill for base malt, a little Crystal 40 for color, and some oats to balance out the body when combined with the coffee.

Nothing too out of the ordinary for today's mash, filled it with about 3 gallons of water at my desired mash temperature.

After mashing for 90 minutes, I collected the wort in some buckets before evenly distributing them to my kettles. For some reason, lautering was very slow. My guess is the oats clogged the filter bed.

For this batch, I had to get all 3 kettles boiling at full capacity simultaneously. My poor stove was struggling. If there is anything that I should upgrade, an outdoor burner and giant kettle is near the top of the list.

Since the wort from all the kettles was to be significant, I made sure to hop each one during the boil. 2 oz of Cascade hops really got spread around.

It took around 1 hour to get all the kettles cool enough after the boil. Used quite a bit of ice to cool them. Lots of hot break too.

Each fermenter I put about 3.5 gallons into. I guess I didn't meet my target volume of wort for a 7.5 gallon batch. This will have slightly higher ABV at the end of it all.

Gravity check on this puts our starting gravity at 1.056. Should finish around 6% ABV. A little bit of Safale S04, and this beer is off and running!

Next steps: The plan is to add in coffee beans about 1 - 2 days before bottling to infuse the coffee flavors. For now, about 7 - 14 days of fermentation await.

CC Pale Ale (7.5 gallons)
12 lb 2 Row
1.5 lb Crystal 40
.75 lb Rolled Oats
2 oz Cascade
2 oz Freshly Roasted Coffee
Safale S04

PART 2 Bottling

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