Pale Ale (extract)

Ingredients for our second (and last) extract beer, a pale ale which we worked to keep simple and clean. 

For this batch we also invested in a propane jet burner, so we could more rapidly heat our water and keep our boil rolling without relying on the stove.

An investment which would make a big difference this time around was a brass wort-chiller. In our first brew, the cooling process took well over an hour, and this time it would be remarkably rapid, only a few minutes!

Being numbers geeks, we knew we'd want to know the actual gravity of our beers. We wanted to take the brewing process seriously in terms of knowing gravity and final ABV, so a refractometer would do the trick.

After a few weeks in the bottles, the carbonation was spot on and we were finally able to get some feel for the results. Right away we could tell there was something "off" about this one. Despite our efforts to develop a pale ale, there was a distinct wheat-like quality to the body and the familiar aroma of a hefeweizen. We could not determine an explanation for this, except to wonder if somehow the online supply store sent us the wrong yeast strain and we didn't notice?