Perkins Pale Ale

The Perkins Pale Ale experiment is under way. So I made the first round two weeks ago: an all Simcoe Pale Ale (ish) beer. Recipe:

• 1lb Light DME
• 2oz Special B (Steeped up to 77C)
• 1 Gallon Water
• 30 Minute Boil
• 0.25oz Simcoe @15 Minutes
• 0.75oz Simcoe @0 Minutes
• US05 (Initially)

That leads up to 3L of a 1.060 (1.062 in fact) beer. I let it go for a couple of weeks and it finished out at 1.012, so about 6.8%, around a top end for a Pale Ale but this is a Perkins Pale Ale. I dumped the left over yeast/trub into a flask, topped it up to 1L with distilled water and left it in the fridge for an hour. Then decanted off the top layer and remixed it. Then I rebrewed the same recipe but sans the US05. I decanted a second time, and poured off 100ml the “middle layer”. The example given in the Yeast book looked a lot clearer than mine but it smelled yeasty — I pitched and aerated. We’ll see how this goes — I’m tempted to bulldog my way throught it, even if the yeast gets infected. In fact that, to me, is the point of the project — to see where the yeast goes even if it is into the land of infection. And hopefully the yeast will tune in to the Perkins temperature changes.