Hunter’s Irish Red BeerSmith Recipe

Ingredients:

•  Grain
  • 7 lbs. Pale Malt (2-Row)
  • 1.5 lbs. Crystal Malt 80L
  • 0.5 lbs. Flaked Wheat
•  Hops
  • Bittering:  0.5 oz Delta 60 mins.
  • Flavoring:  0.5 oz Delta 30 mins.
  • Aroma:  1 oz Fuggle(US) End of Boil, 5 mins. steep before whirlpool

• Yeast
  • Irish Ale White (WLP004)

The design process of this recipe was extremely fun.  Seriously, I can’t recommend BeerSmith enough.  This is a fantastic software program.

I started with the sample Red Ale open in one tab and I started my own new recipe in another.  I selected Irish Red Ale in the style selector to initialize the target ranges for the various beer metrics at the bottom of the screen.  Then I started filling in grains to mimic what I saw in the sample recipe.  I initially wanted to make an extract, partial mash beer but then decided “Hey, I’ve got all this brand new technology and I’ve upgraded my rig over Christmas, why not just make the move to BIAB?”

So I started with Pale 2-row, because if I’m gonna go to the trouble of making beer at home, I’m going with the most quality grains, for sure.  Then I decided we needed a little color and body so let’s do a crystal.  By playing with Beersmith I settled on 80l, and worked the weights around until I settled on 7 and 1.5 lbs.  Then I decided I wanted a little bit of that light airy feel you get with wheat beer so I just threw in a half pound of flaked wheat.  BeerSmith accounted for it, but the sliders all stayed in the green so I could feel confident that was an okay thing to do.  (That’s why we make our own beer, right?)

So then it’s time for hops.  I wanted my aroma hops to be a classic English hops, so I settled on Fuggle just because.  Then I just picked Delta from another list (just because), and played around with the percentages and boil times (thanks BeerSmith) until I got the IBU’s (not gonna get into that right here) just where I wanted.  If you don’t know about my parenthetical dodge, basically it’s a number you don’t normally want to get off if you want to hit your target beer style.

After that it was just a matter of picking the yeast, and I just grabbed the first English Ale strain I found in the “most common” section of the BeerSmith catalog.  Once again, this program steps up to the plate.

An astute reader might also have noticed that my own inventory is reflected in the recipe window.  That is another freaking awesome feature of BeerSmith.  I input every one of my beer ingredient purchases and it records the price of my ingredients for each brew and gives me a heads up view of how much I have left (so long as I run all my brew-days through BeerSmith, as I fully intend to).