Wedding Beer Catchup #3: The Lorax Pale Ale

Earlier in the year I brewed a beer with my friends Adam and Will. It was a simple extract pale ale with some Weyermann CaraAmber for a bit of interest. It was hopped with Simcoe and Columbus and turned into an easy drinking, 4.6% pale ale with a huge tropical fruit juice flavour and aroma. When Adam asked me to brew for his wedding, this was one of the beers he wanted.

Instead of doing an extract batch, I decided to translate the recipe into all grain. True to form, I ended up playing with the recipe a bit so that the similarity between this recipe and the original is mainly in the hopping. I got some biscuit malt from Bill, a great bloke up in Launceston, who's been malting and roasting barley at home. Crackerjack, his biscuit malt reminds me heaps of Sao crackers we used to have growing up. My first batch using his malt got infected so I was keen to give it a shot here. I also increased the OG a little because the other wedding beers were all planned to be between 3.5-4.5% abv.

The Lorax Pale Ale (21L batch)

There's no real connection between the two except for the colour

OG: 1.051
FG: 1.011
IBU: 38 (estimated)
EBC: 10.1
ABV: 5.3%

95% Golden Promise
5% Not For Horses Crackerjack malt

30g Simcoe @ 60 min
30g Simcoe @ 0 min
50g Simcoe @ Dry hop
50g Columbus @ Dry hop

1.5L starter of WLP 090 (estimated pitch of 230 billion cells), fermented at 18C

60 seconds of oxygen

I added 8g CaSO4, 2g CaCl2, 3g MgSO4 to the mash to raise the calcium and get the sulphate levels to enhance the hoppiness and 125g acidulated malt for mash pH correction.

Stepped mash: 66C (40 minutes), 72C (15 minutes) and a 78C mash out.

30/11/13 - Brewed with Adam and Will

8/12/13 - Added dry hops

14/12/13 - Bottled

Tasted on 11/01/14