Double Brew Day! Smiling Sky and Ahimsa Amber

This brew day would be double the fun, and double the work! Up first was a reprise of our Smiling Sky Summer Pale Ale, then we'd try a new recipe, Ahimsa Amber Ale, named after the Sanskrit word which embodies a philosophy of non-violence in body and mind.

In the Ahisma we'd work to correct a number of dissatisfying results of our previous amber, Laughing Hyena.

Exacting our mash and sparge temperatures has been a bit difficult for us thus far. So we continue to seek out guidance on this tricky issue, including various temperature and volume calculators. Each one offers slightly different numbers, so we press on, ultimately knowing that we'll have to develop our own system based on our own equipment and method.

Right in the middle of heating our sparge water for the first batch - another batch of Smiling Sky - the burner quit! We could not figure out what was going wrong, and it took two long trips to the nearby hardware store to finally get back into the process. The final solution: getting a new burner!

For Smiling Sky, the hop presence is what won us over, so the same schedule would be replicated for the second batch. Here bags of Simcoe, Centennial, and Cascade are prepared for their additions.

Despite the mishap with the burner and some more difficulty with mash temperatures, we got our original gravity after the boil within one point of where the first batch was, leaving us pretty pleased in our capacity to replicate a favorite recipe. We'd have to wait for the final results, though, to confidently declare that we could reproduce a recipe.

While preparing for the batch of Ahimsa Amber, we worked on polishing off the previous amber, Laughing Hyena. We knew for Ahimsa we'd want a much more malty profile and rich mouthfeel. Again, mash temperatures would be the key.

One minor edition to the Smiling Sky recipe was using Safale dry yeast instead of the White Labs liquid. We were curious to see what differences it might produce, though they are of the same strain, so it may not be different at all.

With some frustration and confusion, we were low on our mash temperature for Ahimsa, a factor which we hoped wouldn't end up killing the characteristics we were hoping for. So in order to hit our sparge temperature correctly, we overshot the estimates by a pretty significant degree. For even more confusion, we were still low in that respect as well!

One pleasant find was the nice deeper color of the runoff for Ahimsa. Quite a few specialty malts, including a dash of chocolate and some Belgian biscuit malt, were involved in this recipe, with the intent of making it complex, interesting, and malt-oriented. At the last minute we excluded CaraPils, after which we wondered if we'd made the right move.

For Ahimsa, we worked with some hops we had yet to try out. While the Willamette was familiar from some commercial beers, Perle was one variety with which we had no experience. Experimenting with things like this makes this process a lot of fun!

Look at that rich color! And look at that gravity! We were a bit high on that, so we added some cold water after the boil to get it down to our target: right around 1.054.

After cooling, Ahimsa flows out of the kettle into the fermenter. We didn't want to bother with aerating, but this long pour likely helped with that.

Our new eight-gallon fermenter filled with Ahimsa Amber!  We hoped to avoid any blow-off (a problem with the last batch we used dry yeast) and give us some room for bigger batches in the future. It also allowed us to do two batches today, which was a fun challenge.

After kegging,getting some good carbonation, and aging for a week, these two turned out okay. Smiling Sky was as expected, and many of the deliciously citrusy qualities we enjoyed the first time around were well replicated. As for Ahimsa, we were missing some important elements, mostly thanks to missing our mash temperatures. Even for the mildly hopped amber, the malt profile was weak and the body light, making it a bit less than we hoped. We continue to learn and improve our method, and the next batches will certainly top these in a number of ways. Cheers to progress!