In late 2014, Stone Brewing discontinued their Pale Ale and posted the recipe. After picking up the last of the Ahtanum hops from the homebrew store, we got to work!

Brewer’s Notes

The brew was uneventful but low, mash was 155F +- 5F, resulting in low conversion & missed the target gravity. Wort is fairly hoppy, considering the boil may also have been short off of the recipe. Blue cheese flavor? Strong bittering with mild hop flavors. Very rich, cracker, some citrus. Hops steeped for ~20 minutes after flameout while temperature lowered to 100F. After adding water, pitched at target temp of 72F. Boil volume was 3 gal with post-boil volume of 2.875 gal. Ran out of O2 as well.

OG: 1.056 @ 80F, target 1.062
FG: 1.012 @ 75F, target 1.016

Fermenting Notes

Primary

Target Temperature range: 72F
Average: 73.76F
Standard Deviation: 2.73

stone_pale_ale_1_primary

6.28.2015 – 1.020 @ 69F – Racked to secondary. Some banana coming from yeast, still tastes fairly sweet with strong bitterness on finish. Flavor needs to fill out more. Almost no aroma, which is expected with no dry hop. The color is fairly dark, more like an english pale. Should be a good beer when finished.

Secondary

Target Temperature range: 72F
Average: 72.30F
Standard Deviation: 0.86

stone_pale_ale_1_secondary

7.6.2015 – 1.012 @ 73F – Racked to keg. Not bad, some off-flavor, DMS? Very warm, needs chilling and to settle – very hazy. Will carbonate for a week or so at 14psi.

Tasting Notes

7.31.2015 – This beer is starting to come into its own. A little aging helped. Does not seem well balanced, though, too much bitterness for the low hop aroma. The beer in general drank well, and Keg was emptied around 8/14 (brought the last of it to the homebrew club meeting). I might use this as a base, but add more aroma hop to bring out the hop qualities.

Recipe