My friend that brews with me wanted to brew Monday. The result of his desire was a british E.S.B. What I remeber about the recipe was 9 pounds american 2-row, 1 pound 80L crystal, and .5 pounds of 20L crystal, and EKG hops to finish, target to bitter. It was my first chance to try out my new brix refractometer. The wort came in under gravity, which I think was mostly because of smaller than anticipated boil-off. Both of us are excited about a very crystal-heavy beer.

I'm considering buying ProMash, which I've been half using for the last few recipes.

Today I made an amber ale. The mash went exactly as anticipated: 15 minutes at 125, 30 minutes at 145, 45 minutes at 155 and mash out at 167. Well, okay, I think I mashed at 154 for the forty-five mintes stage and I only hit 166 for the mash-out. Since my evidence suggests that going over 155 can inhibit sachrification, I'm okay with that and the mash out is just a control step--make sure enzymes are stopped or damn near, which is to say 166 is good enough for that. The next question is what attenuation I get. I'd like about 73 or 74%, since that's the upper end of the yeast's range. I'm trying to use the time of the rest at 145 to control fermentability, while leaving the rest constant; I hope that 15 minutes usually gets me right at the bottom end of the range for a yeast and 30 minutes to get the upper end with 45 getting me a couple percent beyond that. (My experience with long 149 mashes is that one can exceed a yeast's attenuation range by as much as 5%. My than one IPA went from 67 to 8 with a long cool single step mash like that.) The orginal gravity of this beer was 1.0516. The recipe was as below.