Brewing an Irish Red Ale – Ingredient Shopping
Brewing beer is a hobby of mine. I haven’t done very many beers so far, but I find it very satisfying and rewarding. I’ve done a few kit brews with dry malt extract and one extract brew so far. I haven’t had any input into the ingredients I brew with before now – time for a change! I picked a recipe from Brewing Classic Styles, by Jamil Zainasheff & John J. Palmer, for an Irish Red Ale (It’s called Ruabeoir in their book, which smacks of putting “red beer” into Google Translate, but I digress…). Having never followed a beer recipe before, I struggled a bit parsing the ingredient list. The °L notation in the recipe after some of the grains was particularly confusing. A quick search of the index informed me that this is “degrees Lovibond”, a scale for measuring the colour of the beer. In the EU, EBC (European Brewing Convention) is used instead, which is 1.97 times the °L value. I did all of my shopping on The Homebrew Company‘s website – they have a big selection and I’ve ordered from them before when doing my extract brew. The grain bill called for an English pale malt extract,…
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