Homebrew Recipe: Bury the Bulldogs Amber Ale

Bury the Bulldogs Amber Ale

Brewing Premise: This was another “Carter-Finley” brew that we teamed up to make. The first CF Brew recipe I shared was here if you’re interested. This beer was actually part of a Double Brew Day and made at the same time as another of the CF brews I’ll share at a later date. With the theme of making fun of our opponents through our beer names we dubbed this Bury the Bulldogs as we were playing Citadel. At the outset we knew we wanted a good amber but weren’t positive how to get there. The hop schedule on this one lends itself to being a little more a hoppy amber – but don’t let that scare you IPA haters! This is an excellent amber with some added complexity. We’ve modded this recipe over the years as it proved a great starting point.

Recipe

Grain Bill

6.6 lbs Golden Light Briess LME

½ lb Crystal 120L

½ lb Vienna

½ lb Victory

¼ lb Roasted Barley

Hop Schedule

(60) 1 oz Magnum

(15) 1 oz Saaz

(5) 1 oz Willamette

Yeast – 1 packet SafeAle US-05

Boil Volume – 2.5 gallons

Fermentor Volume  - 5 gallons

OG- 1.064

FG – 1.016

ABV – 6.3%

Procedure: Standard extract brewing procedure by heating up 2.5 gallons to 160F and steeping grains 30 mins. Be sure not to get overly zealous in squeezing that bag! Brought to boil and added all of LME and then followed hop schedule. Cooled down in icebath and transferred to fermentor via dumping method. Topped off to 5 gallons with tap water and pitched yeast.

Fermentation/ Packaging – Fermented in primary for about 2-3 weeks and then went straight to bottle.

Tasting Notes – Excellent malt complexity with hints of roasted and caramel flavors. Slight hop flavor at very finish but malt forward and well balanced.

Improvement/Tweak Ideas – Playing around with the hops some to go a little less hop forward has some affect on this beer for sure. Going with an ounce of Willamette @15 mins instead of Saaz or using ½ oz @15 and then ½ oz @ 5 are an easy mod to make it a little cheaper and get more malt. The specialty grains here could be considered as a blueprint and I would love to brew this beer several times and increase or decrease each one by a ¼ pound to get a slightly different amber. Go crazy with it and let me know what your favorite mod is!

--Ben