Fresh Home Hop Cascade Pale Ale

Fresh Cascade Pale Ale

First beer using fresh hops from the yard. I believe they’re Cascade, though hop variety obviously can’t be confirmed from appearance alone.

The goal was to make the fresh hops the interesting part and keep everything else simple and difficult to screw up: neutral American malt, clean yeast, known-alpha bittering hops, and all of the homegrown hops late in the process.

Recipe

Batch size: ~5 gallons
Style: Fresh-hop American Pale Ale

Grain

• 9.5 lb Rahr Pale Malt
• 1 lb Weyermann Vienna Malt

Total grain: 10.5 lb

Hops

• 0.5 oz Magnum pellets — 60 minutes
• 6 oz fresh Cascade — 5 minutes
• 10 oz fresh Cascade — whirlpool

Total fresh hops: 16 oz

The fresh hops were used only late in the boil because their alpha-acid percentage is unknown. Magnum provided the predictable bittering charge.

Yeast

• Imperial A07 Flagship

No dry yeast bullshit.

Water

Mash water:

• 4 gallons
• 1/2 tsp gypsum
• 1/4 tsp calcium chloride
• 1/4 Campden tablet

Sparge water was prepared separately and used to bring the kettle up to pre-boil volume.

Mash

Strike water went in at 167°F, a little higher than the planned 164°F.

Mash target was approximately 152°F for 60 minutes.

Grain was mashed in a removable grain tube, then the tube was lifted and sparged.

Boil

60-minute boil.

After flameout I started chilling toward the planned 170°F whirlpool temperature.

The wort got down to 165°F before I managed to get the remaining hops in. Rather than reheating it, I added:

• 10 oz fresh Cascade at 165°F

The full fresh-hop charge was then allowed to steep for approximately 20 minutes.

The original 6 oz five-minute addition stayed in the wort during the whirlpool.

Cooling

Immersion chilling was slower than expected.

• 158°F → 100°F: ~20 minutes
• 100°F → 89°F: another ~20 minutes

The Anvil kettle has electronics in the base, so putting the kettle into an ice bath wasn’t an option.

Eventually chilled to approximately 67°F.

Original Gravity

Refractometer:

OG: ~1.070

This is considerably higher than the recipe’s predicted ~1.052, so I want to verify the refractometer calibration and/or reading before treating 1.070 as definitive.

If 1.070 is correct, either efficiency was much higher than expected, final wort volume was lower than planned, or both.

Fermentation

Pitched one pouch of Imperial A07 Flagship at approximately 67°F.

Plan:

• Hold around 65–67°F during active fermentation
• Allow to rise toward 68–70°F as fermentation finishes
• Package once gravity is stable

Targets

Original recipe targets:

• OG: 1.050–1.054
• FG: 1.010–1.012
• ABV: ~5.2–5.5%
• IBU: ~30–35

If the measured 1.070 OG is real and A07 finishes around 1.012–1.014, this may end up closer to 7.3–7.6% ABV than the intended pale ale.

Brew Day Notes

The biggest unknown in this batch is the homegrown fresh Cascade.

I deliberately avoided using it for bittering because I don’t know the alpha-acid percentage. The majority went into a relatively cool 165°F whirlpool in an attempt to preserve the fresh citrus/floral/resin character without extracting excessive bitterness or vegetal character.

Sixteen ounces of wet hops looked ridiculous going into five gallons of beer, but because freshly harvested hops are mostly water, that’s roughly equivalent to only a few ounces of dried hops.

Now we wait.