Double Brew Day! Rapture Red Ale and Hop(e)fulness IPA

We're becoming big fans of the British pale malt Maris Otter, and both of our recipes today called for much of it. We read up a bit and used it first in our Smiling Sky. The subtle variation and bit of nuttiness imparted by Maris Otter compared to standard 2-row pale malts has been a nice element to set some of our recipes apart from the big breweries out there. They tend to shy away from MO because of it's greater expense for commercially sized batches.

Marshall's recipe of the day was Rapture Red Ale, named to commemorate the brew day coinciding with the predicted day of the rapture, May 21, 2011. Of course, we all ended up surviving, and this Irish Red Ale poured this brilliant reddish amber after the first and second runnings. 

Chris made some quick notes regarding grain absorption and loss. We strive to come as near to perfect as we can in our volume and temperature estimates, so we take efforts to document the little variables which help us do that. Today we did a great job hitting our mash and sparge temperatures, hopefully making Rapture Red Ale a malt-oriented showcase. 

All finished and beginning to ferment, Rapture Red Ale sits in our new freezer. We're thrilled to have added this to our collection of brewing equipment. Inside our ales will sit at the precise fermenting temperature we set, and later on we can lager! 

We're always thrilled to have visitors on brew day. We give the brief tour, talk about our method, and share some of our past brews. A day at the Bright Spot homebrewery is always a good one! 

Chris' own recipe (the first designed entirely by him) was a dark IPA called Hop(e)fulness. The runnings show that this will be a dark ale, hopefully with many of the characteristics of an IPA. Good amounts of Centennial and Chinook make up the late hop additions in this one.