It was a dark and raining morning…Redemption Harvest Ale

I brew a fair number of beers that I don’t blog about – basic bitters, pale ales and the like which have nothing special, funky or unusual about them. Crowd-pleasers for BBQs, camping, etc. Today’s beer is one of these, but I’m blogging it anyways for two reasons: 1) I feel the need for some redemption after my series of disastrous brews, and 2) I’m doing a harvest (wet-hop) ale, using the last of this years cascade harvest.

It was a bad year for the hops – too wet, too cold (the combination of which destroyed my Goldings), and one Cascade plant got decimated by mites. But, despite that I’ve got ~8oz of dried cascades in the freezer, and close to that sitting on my drying rack after a very wet morning spent picking hops. I’m planning on putting 250 g (over 8 oz) of wet hops into this beer, but even so, I should have about that much left over – after drying giving another 2.5 or so ounces of dried cascades for the freezer.

The one point I want to make before hitting the fold is how I guesstimated the alpha acids in the wet hops. Wet hops are about 6 parts water and 1 part dry-weight. So the 1% alpha acid number used in the recipe is equal to the average alpha acid content of dried Cascade hops (6%) divided by the wet:dry ratio (6X).

Recipe and notes below the fold.