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Amarillo IPA Recipe

Amarillo IPA recipe for home brewers

This is the recipe for our Amarillo IPA. We don’t mind publishing these, there’s no ‘secret sauce’ to these recipes and part of the pleasure in brewing beer is sharing – so we are sharing all our recipes. If you brew the beer let us know, and if you want to buy a recipe kit it’s here: Amarillo IPA Recipe Kit

All of our recipe kits are designed to use a starting volume of 23lt, which should yield 18lt into the keg or bottles, and a brewhouse efficiency of 70%. This is the complete recipe, it can be scaled to suit any batch size.

Amarillo IPA Recipe

Original Gravity 1.049   Final Gravity 1.009  ABV 5.2%  IBU 18.5 SRM  4.7

Fermentables:

3.5kg Maris Otter – Classic English pale ale malt

250gm Torrified Wheat – To promote head retention

250gm Malted Naked Oats – Mouthfeel / body

Hops:

Amarillo – Sweet/citrusy/tropical notes

Yeast:

Safale US05

Mash Guidelines:

Mash temp 66°C for 60 min

Boil 60 min

Hop Schedule:

10gm Amarillo at first wort or as boil starts

10gm Amarillo at 5 minutes before flameout

10gm Amarillo at flameout

10gm Amarillo dry hop – at 3 and 5 days into fermentation

Yeast Pitch:

15-20°C Ideally 18°C and fermented to final gravity – expect 5-7 days

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Beer Gas

Beer gas for home brewers and for dispense within home bars has become something of an issue in some areas and, as it happens, the Fylde Coast where we are is one of those areas.

Beer gas is kind of the under appreciated component in home bars or home brewing setups but when we get down to it it’s a critical component. Without gas all of the home bars we install, every single one of them, stops dispensing beer. Similarly, if you carbonate beer in your brewing setup as we do over here in’t shed, or ferment under pressure as some do, then without CO2 your process comes to a halt.

As ever with these problems we’ve looked for a solution and whilst we don’t always find a solution we have in this case; we’ve done a deal with Hobby Brew and are now their appointed agent for beer gas on the Fylde Coast and surrounding area. We can supply C02, 30/70 and 60/40 beer gas.

The deal is a £70 bottle deposit with refills (cylinder exchanges actually) priced ay £36 for mixed gas and £35 for CO2.

This is definitely a step away from finding a bottle on Freebay and then exchanging it for a full with the gas company or getting a cylinder from a pal who has a pub, we get that completely, but it is a guarantee of supply locally and you won’t be stuck for beer gas.

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Home Bars – Troubleshooting

We will add to this as we think of problems we can solve!

We get very distressed over bad beer over here in’t shed. Probably not as distressed as you if it’s your bar that’s serving the bad beer but pretty close; we take it very personally. As a ‘for instance’, my phone rang this evening during my sacrosanct couch hour; it was a beer customer in distress though and as the fifth emergency service I just couldn’t ignore it. The problem in this instance was flat beer, which upsets us as much as it upsets you, so what might be the cause? More importantly, what might be the solution?

So; basic checks:

Is there beer in the keg? I know, sorry…

Is there gas in the cylinder? If the gas runs out and you carry on dispensing the system will use whatever gas it can find to put the beer through the tap. It will use the gas in the headspace of the keg and then the gas in solution will try to equalize… Sorry – got all technical there for a moment. Make sure there’s gas and it’s turned on

Are you using the right gas? Most beers will dispense very happily under 60/40. The flip side to that is many, many beers will go bonkers and turn into a foamy pain in the arse under 30/70 and it’s very easy to confuse the two gases. Check which gas your beer needs and use the apporopriate one.

Are there any restrictions? Check for kinks in any pipes, particularly around the keg coupler, to make sure that gas is getting into the keg

Gas Pressure? For mixed gas we are looking for 25psi minimum and 35-40psi maximum at the secondary regulator. for us trying to troubleshoot home bars we have to accept that we are up against ambient temperatures and that goes for the gas too. The gas might be up and down a bit if it’s baking hot where it’s stored so do expect some fluctuations.

Has the regulator gone to Funky Town? I got a call out to one of our own mobile bars which was dispensing really slowly. We use new regulators in all our mobile bar setups, this one still had the protective film on the gauges, but it was clearly doing something odd. The primary dial was making a strange little ‘ticking’ movement and the only way I could get it to dispense was stay on site and adjust it up and down as needed. For me there are no serviceable parts on beer gas regulators so this needed replacing; beer gas regulators can fail so be suspicous of them.

Hygiene? Far, far, far and away (not where Shrek lives – not that far away) the most common cause of flat beer is something that needs cleaning and it’s usually either glasses or beer lines. People find it a tricky concept to buy into but yeast particles love beer lines, shine a torch through them and see for yourself, and glasses washed but not rinsed are clean but not really beer clean. Dishwashers do a very good job of cleaning glasses but the very best thing you can do for them is a rinse under a hot tap.

In our instance here it was glasses. I was fairly convinced it was when I set off so I took one of my own with me. When we wash glasses it’s hard to believe that they can be the cause of any problem – they’re clean right? – when we’re troubleshooting our home bars but the truth is – boring science bit here about detergent film buildup that I don’t totally understand myself – that washing up liquid and beer don’t play well together.

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The Show Goes On…

So the dang Mexicans have sent us this hideous disease and we are all confined to barracks… oh, hang on. Not the Mexicans? Okay, well anyway we’re all confined to barracks but Boris, bless ‘im, has decided that beer is on the ‘essential’ list – and how brilliantly British is that by the way? – so we over here at T’Shed are doing our very best to get some stock and get the webshop sorted.

In all fairness, the concept here was never small-pack deliveries. The Shed Beer concept was this neat idea that we thought would work really well for functions and events:

Shed Beer
The Original Beer Shed

Now of course, thanks to someone who isn’t Mexican, all events for 2020 have been cancelled. We will still roll out the beer shed concept as it’s absolutely the core of the Shed Beer masterplan; we just don’t know when that might be.

In the meantime, being disciples of the principle that ‘when life gives us lemons we should find a recipe for lemonade rather than bitch about not having any oranges’, we need to adjust what we are doing; and maybe learn something in the process so…

Any and all stock of our own beer that we had is being packaged into 500ml bottles and sold through the webshop for local delivery. The brewing supplies we have can be packaged up and sold to local homebrewers because our bulk supply lines are still open, and we are sourcing as much stock as we can locally so that we can offer as diverse a product range as possible.

If you are a homebrewer we can help with malt and hops just now and we are working on complete whole grain recipe kits. We are always happy to talk to kindred spirits as well so will help where we can.

Our trading relationship with our favourite local brewers is still very much in place so we will be able to offer their products as well. Those will be mostly small pack but if anyone needs kegs we may be able to get them and there’s a distinct possibility that we may be able to do some bag-in-box cask beers and craft ciders.

Going forwards we will be able to brew once or twice a week but that will take a few weeks before there’s any impact, and this assumes that our supply lines remain open and beer deliveries remain essential.

We are doing our best. Please be patient, please like and share the Facebook page, and do email with anything we might be able to help with in these weird times; we’re listening.

Steve