Coriander Pale Ale

This past Saturday found me and my cousin Drew out on the back porch brewing up a batch of coriander-spiced american pale ale. Sounds a little weird? I hope so. The thought behind it was to take a nice, juicy, hoppy pale ale and add a little extra citrus & spicy zing in it through the coriander. The hops were whole Amarillo and plug Simcoe, so its certainly an American Pale in character. I’m hoping it’s light and drinkable enough to quench one’s thirst during the hot summer months ahead. This was Drew’s first experience at homebrewing, and I’m hoping he enjoyed it enough to either come back and brew a monster batch of Choking Sun with me or start brewing down in Atlanta.

We logged the session using my BrewzNET software and the wireless grant hardware you’ve seen here before. I still don’t have the in-software trending capability done yet, but I did capture all the session values to a SQL Server database, and used Excel to work up a couple of trend charts.

You’ll notice a couple of things – one, the sparge rate was pretty steady once I adjusted it up to the proper range of 1-2 qts/minute. It did start to drop some towards the end, due to a decrease in mash temperature and the dropping liquid level in the mash tun, however it was far from representing a “stuck” situation. Second, the internal temperature of my control box (as represented by the SSR1 and SSR2 temperatures) increased over time – this was completely due to it getting hotter and hotter outside (the temperatures are almost exactly what the weather service was reporting)…. but they were still well below anything representing a danger to the electrical components.

The brew day went very smoothly, aside from getting a (typically) higher gravity than I wanted (1.060 instead of 1.052!!!). We had everything wrapped up by around 3pm, and spent the rest of the day relaxing and drinking the homebrew I had on tap. We actually kicked the Homegrown Amber by the time we went to bed, although I didn’t realize it until the following day.

This weekend will be an American wheat which I will likely put fruit in – we’re thinking raspberries for one fermenter and “tropical” for the other, meaning mangos, papaya, passion fruit, and anything else we can get our hands on. YUM!