Cedar Rapids Brewing Society

If anyone is in the North Liberty area, I will be brewing up a batch of Irish Red Ale tomorrow afternoon, hopefully starting around 1:30 or 2. Feel free to give me a call if you are interested: Four-Zero-Two, Six-Eight-Zero, Two-One-Eight-Four.

Address: 1372 Logan Court, North Liberty.

Penn Street to Highway 965, north to 240th Street, west to Logan Court, north to the end of the cul-de-sac.

Questions? Call me.

Oh Man, I have a the ingredients for a red that I planned to fire up this morning but it's too cold and windy, but now I have other plans this afternoon, so it will have to wait.

I have to ask. How are you going to get that awesome red color? I saw a lot of recipes doing some different things and I had settled on .25 lbs of black toasted barley. I'm slightly worried that it will be too dark, cause that stuff is something like 450L.

I am using Northern Brewer's kit for their red ale and the included grain steep is very close to the classic red color. I am planning on playing around with color when I get into all-grain brewing in a year or two.

How did the brew day go? This link goes to Jamil's website. The article is by no means about Irish Red, but the recipe he uses makes a blood red color. He used Crystal 120L and Chocolate Malt. A longer boil helps increase the red color too.

http://www.mrmalty.com/late_hopping.htm

The brew day went pretty well. Color was a little more copper than red, but shouldn't be too bad. OG was 1.042, 0.002 above target, so I consider that good. It had some fermentation this morning, but I have a feeling my fermentation cabinet (under the stairs) might be a tad cold for an ale so it will probably get moved to the downstairs shower tonight.