Brewing Pale Ales

 

Unfortunately I don’t have much information to digest from your question. All I know is that you have no luck brewing pale ales and I seem to be your last resort. The name of my column may imply that I am sort of psychic, but to be honest I am just an ordinary person . . . who happens to have a particularly simple view of brewing.

I feel compelled to use a little tough love here to help you with your problem. Either you are really, really unlucky when it comes to brewing pale ales, or the other beers you brew have not been as successful as you let on. Style aside, brewing styles that are expected to be clean and balanced, such as pale lagers, pale ales, dark lagers, etc, requires good brewing technique. Consistent and “proper” brewing techniques (whatever the heck that really means) are required to brew good beer, no matter the style.

I suggest having some homebrewing friends give critical feedback to a variety of your beers. It would help if you could present them in a blind fashion, mixed in with some other homebrews, to help eliminate bias. If you are a taster, you could recruit a non-taster to present the samples. Or you could solicit feedback by entering your beer into competitions. Personally, though, I have never been overly impressed with judges’ comments on competition sheets. A good tasting where flavors are discussed by the judges is usually more revealing; however that’s just my opinion.

There may be something in all of your beers that could be the culprit and it just happens to be more obvious to you in your pale ales. Pale ale is not a style that easily hides flaws. Some homebreweries, just like commercial breweries, have a “house character” common to all beers. If this house character is caused by a flaw in technique it can be eliminated by identifying the problem.

The techniques that I encourage all brewers to really focus their attention on are cleaning (and yes there is a technique associated with cleaning), wort aeration, pitching rate and fermentation temperature control. If you mash, you need to understand how mash thickness and temperature can be used to affect wort fermentability and of course how water chemistry affects enzymes and beer flavor. Whatever tact you choose to take, you should have a method that makes sense. In other words, everything you do should have a reason that you more-or-less understand. Mashing for two hours because that’s what the recipe said to do is not a very good reason in my book.

If you have good brewing technique then you should be able to execute the details of a recipe and brew beer like a technician. A good technician brewer can follow any recipe presented to them and follow the process through to its intended outcome. If a technician brewer starts off with a bad recipe and methodically follows its course the outcome is most likely going to be bad. I am going to assume that you are just using problem recipes. In all reality, most brewers are not perfect when it comes to technique and you should critically evaluate your methods and look for things that can be improved.

It’s pretty easy to spot a really lame recipe once you go through the brewing process and taste the disappointing outcome. A good technical brewer can confidently blame the recipe for a bad brew just like an excellent group of musicians can blame the notes of the score for a less than harmonious tune. The ideal approach is not to brew a beer according to a bad recipe and avoid the disappointment that surely will follow.

I try to compose recipes that have a decent chance of success (at least that’s what I tell myself). When coming up with a new recipe, I use past successes to help guide my new recipe. When in doubt, I subscribe to the “less is more” philosophy of brewing. I would much rather brew a beer that clearly lacks something. I believe it is easier to pick out what is missing from a beer than identifying flavors that need to be removed. If a flavor is missing I try to identify ways to add that component to the beer the next time I brew it. Simplistically, one can argue that if a beer is way too bitter, it’s pretty obvious that the flavor that needs to be partially removed is bitterness. But if you are brewing one of those “everything, but the kitchen sink” kind of recipes, the task of identifying what doesn’t belong is a bit more complex.

To me, pale ale is a style that is best approached with a very simple recipe. This opinion is true of both American and British-style pale ales. You do not need a laundry list of malts; usually pale malt, some crystal malt and the odd “toasty malt” for added flavor, or roasted malt for a touch of extra color is all you really need or want. In my opinion, more than three malts in a pale ale recipe is excessive unless you are fine-tuning a recipe and adding some missing flavor note.

Mashing should also be simple because the base malts used for pale ales usually require nothing more than a single-temperature infusion mash. Use a water-to-malt weight ratio somewhere in the neighborhood of 3:1 (0.36 gallons of water/pound malt or 3 liters/kg) and do not go crazy with adding Burton salts to your water unless you have a good reason for doing it. Remember that all pale ales are not brewed in the Burton style, one that is noted for its pronounced mineral palate, and that not all brewing water needs to be enhanced by adding minerals. If you don’t know much about your local water, I recommend using distilled or reverse osmosis treated water and adding minerals to create the water you want. I like to use a mix of calcium sulfate and calcium chloride and target around 100 ppm of calcium in my water.

The next major part of a pale ale recipe is the hopping schedule. When you say your pale ales have a “citric” flavor, two things come to mind. The first is a citrus-like aroma and the second is sourness. While sourness usually comes from acid production from bacteria, such as Lactobacillus, the citrus aroma usually comes from hops. And if you have enough of the hops to make the beer smell like citrus fruit, it can sometimes taste, at least in my opinion, that the beer has a lemonade-like zing.

The hops most commonly used in American-style pale ales are the “C” varieties. Cascade, Centennial, Columbus and Chinook, and all have this citrus-like aroma. Although these varieties, especially Cascade and Centennial, have become the signature aroma hop for the American style pale ale, they can be overbearing. Large mid-boil additions can add a flavor that is part bitter and part piney/citrus. Large late additions mainly add aroma and are responsible for the big, hoppy nose of many pale ales. There is no correct hopping schedule to follow, but I have found that using only two additions, one for bitterness and one for aroma, gets rid of a mid-palate, herbal, hop flavor that can be distracting in some hoppy ales. Try backing off on the hops if the recipes you have previously used have been aggressive in the hop department.

Finally there is yeast. If you are brewing American-style pale ales, use a nice, neutral yeast strain. My old standby when it comes to clean ale yeast is White Labs WLP001 (California Ale) or Wyeast 1056 (American Ale). I like to ferment this strain between 64 and 68 °F (18 and 20 °C) to produce very clean beers with minimal aroma from the yeast. If you are brewing British style pale ales you should use a different strain since a lot of the flavor in British ales results from the yeast strain. In my opinion, the American pale ales tend to be more malt and hop accented. British ale yeast strains used in pale ales, for example Wyeast 1968 (London ESB Ale) and White Labs WLP002 (English Ale), are much more flocculent than a strain like 1056 or WLP001. If you don’t allow these yeast strains to settle with time or use a fining aid like isinglass, you may have beers that are a bit yeasty.

These are the big recipe topics I would focus on. If you have sound brewing technique it may be just finding the right recipe to suit your taste. And if you buy into the “less is more” philosophy, seek out recipes that look simple and tweak them over time to come up with a house pale ale recipe that you are pleased to drink. Good luck!

Response by Ashton Lewis.