Brown Bear Ale

The plan: My wife's sister lives out in Omaha Nebraska and every year for Spring Break we'd go there to visit her and her family. One of the first breweries we fell in love with was Empyrean Ales in Lincoln NE. They have some phenomenal beers; some our favorites are Third Stone Brown, Lunasea ESB, and Darkside Vanilla Porter. Every spring, usually around mid-March, I get a wicked craving for these beers since that's when we'd always visit them. They have a very limited distribution, so it's damn near impossible for me to get their beers anymore, so I decided to try to clone them! After some thought and shitty correspondence from the brewery (what a let down), I decided to clone their Third Stone Brown, off of the basic info I had. On our first trip to the brewery, we got their sampler, which came with a paper mat that detailed each of the beers (shown at left). It showed "Stats" (5% ABV, 13.1 OG, 14.5 IBU's), "Ingredients" (Pale 2row, Carastan, Special, Victory, Chocolate, Vienna; Willamette hops (aroma); Ale yeast), and "History of Style" (blah blah blah... Northern England).

This would be my 3rd all grain batch, and so I still really didn't know what the hell I was doing, so I looked at the grain bill and tried to figure out which were base grains and which were specialty grains. I also looked into Clone Formuation on BeerAdvocate.com's Homebrew forum, as well as a sweet article in BYO. I plugged the ingredients into Beersmith, converted the OG, and played around with grain percentages until it looked good. I posted the guesstimate on BA and a couple people concurred, so I went with it. Later I went back to Empyrean Ale's website and realized that they had changed the recipe since I had that sampler... well eff'em, I'm gonna brew the Third Stone I fell in love with!

Recipe:
OG: 13.1 Pluto converted to 1.047
FG: to achieve 5%, FG needs to be 1.012
IBU's: 14.5
6# Pale 2-row (UK)
4# Vienna
1# Crystal 60-L (no Carastan, which could be substituted for Crystal 30L, but no 30L so I just used 60L, which just made it a little darker)
1# Victory
1/4# Special B (no Special, so used Special B, just a little darker)
1/4# Chocolate Malt
1 oz. Willamette 4.4% (45 min)
1 oz. Willamette 4.4% (flame out)
Wyeast 1098 (British Ale), starter 48 hours prior to.

2/6 BREW DAY: Using my old cooler, this time sealed with the right, food safe, water sealant. :-) Worked great. I heated 15.65 quarts of water to 170, added to cooler, let sit for 5 minutes then doughed in. Stirred and broke up clumps (something I didn't do before) and hit 154. Closed it up, wrapped with 2 blankets, and let'er simmer. 60 minutes later, checked temp - 152. Sweet! I had heated up 2.33 quarts to boil, then added it to the cooler for mash out. Stirred it up, temp = 168. Let it settle for 10 minutes, collected vorlof, then collected first runnings. ~4 gallons, Brix = 15/1.059. I had been heating up 2 gallons of water, so I added 1 more and heated it all up to 185, then added to cooler. Stirred up good, let sit for 10 minutes, and then collected second runnings. 6.5 total gallons, total Brix = 12/1.047. Threw the kettle on the burner, took about 1/2 hour to get to boiling, added 1 oz. Willamette @ 45 min, then 1 oz. @ flame out. I decided to try to use the washing machine water source to pump through my chiller. Worked great... except I forgot to check it and the damn thing overflowed! So I had to halt it, drain the washer, then restart the chilling. What a mess. It just barely filled up a second time by the time I hit ~65F. I stopped it, ran it out the spigot through a sanitized hose, into a sanitized funnel w/ filter, and into sanitized carboy. Got about 5.25 gallons, Brix = 14/1.055. I had my yeast slurry ready to go, it was at about 64/66F, I swirled it up and pitched it all in, about 1000mL worth. Capped it with a blow off tube, and proceeded to clean up. Total time... 8 AM started to heat water, doughed in about 9/9:30, pitched yeast @ 2PM. Not bad!

2/13 RACK TO SECONDARY: Racked the brown ale over to secondary after bottling the Dunkelweizen. I almost filled the 5 gallon carboy, I had to stop short. I took a sample to check gravity, Brix=7, I used BeerSmith first and it said I had a 1.026 which seemed pretty high. I used the morebeer refractometer tool and it says I was at 1.011. I decided it was time to bust out the old hydrometer to see who the hell was right (and I was hoping it'd be the morebeer sheet). Hydrometer reading = 1.018. Not great. I bet I'll go down a point or two in secondary and priming, hopefully. Regardless, it has a nice color, smell and taste were a little hard because of a bad cold I had... had faint tastes of sweet, nutty, malty, carmely flavors. This is gonna be good, can't wait :-)

3/10 BOTTLED: I got around to bottling this much later than I wanted, no big deal though. I've been saving up Sierra Nevada bottles for a while now, since they're the closest things to Emyprean Ales bottles. I was able to 1 &3/4 cases of 12 oz bottles, plus 6 22oz bottles. I'm hoping to be able to drink these by the time my sister-in-law and niece & nephew show up the week of March 21st. We shall see.

3/20 TASTING!: 10 days in, why not give it a shot. First bottle, flat flat flat. Tried another on Wednesday the 24th, still flat. Ruh roh. I'll try another in a week. Hoping that they're not all flat.

4/19 SECOND TASTING: Pulled another bottle out when Dave & Megan came over for dinner. This time it poured with carbonation. Phew! I think what happened is that the bottles I had priming upstairs turned out fine, they primed at around 65F. The ones in the basement I think went dormant because the temp down there was around 50-55F. I pulled them all upstairs and hopefully they'll kick in.

5/1 HOMEBREW COMPETITION: Upon the suggestion of two beer judges I'm acquainted with, I decided to submit this to my local homebrew comp. I was a little worried because still only half of the bottles were opening up with carbonation. This was tasting better with time, but I was still getting a little bit of that astringency like I found in the stout and dunkelweizen. Below are the score sheets..
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