Red Rock Ale

Ingredients
6.6 lb Light LME
1 lb. Light DME
0.75 lb. Crisp crystal malt (80° Lovibond)
1.0 lb. Maris Otter pale malt
1.0 oz Columbus whole hops 13% AAU
1 oz Cascade pellet hops 6.2% AAU
American Ale yeast (Wyeast 1056)
¾ cup corn sugar
Full recipe found here.


On my first go round of the Red Rock Ale I managed to add an entire pound of corn sugar to the batch and the finished product was... well... you get the idea. This time my main goals were to match the flavor of the original brew and have the mouth feel wind up less like yeasty soda and more like, ya know, beer.

This is an extremely easy and straight forward recipe that's great for a new homebrewer, or just a quick and easy brew day. Recently I spent an entire day cutting, cleaning, and roasting a pumpkin to add to a batch, so a nice and easy follow up seemed in order. Though the original recipe calls for strictly Cascade hops, I wanted to change the bitterness a little and wound up going with some Columbus whole leaf hops. Here's what their reduction looked like for this batch:

  

And because I'm kind of lazy and don't like syphoning my beer into the fermenter I use a colander to catch all of the whole leaves. I've yet to have any issues doing things this way and it saves me a ton of time, not only by cutting out the syphoning, but also with less equipment to sterilize after.