Summer Ale in December

My wife's favorite beer is Sam Summer. Unfortunately, you can only buy it from from April - August. I attempted to clone it with the following recipe:

5.00 gallons

4.75 Canadian 2-Row
4.50 White Wheat Malt
1.00 oz Tettnang @ 60 minutes
2 tbls. Fresh Lemon Zest @ 5 minutes
2 grams Grains of Paradise @ 5 minutes

Yeast: WLP008 White Labs East Coast Ale
Mash temp: 152 degrees F
OG: 1.054 (I was aiming for 1.050, but I got better than expected efficiency)


It was my first time performing a mash out. I was a little scared of the high quantity of wheat malt without using any rice hulls to prevent a stuck sparge, so I thought it would be helpful. The mash out worked great! It was the fastest draining mash and sparge I have ever had.

The smell coming from the carboy has a really strong lemon note. I am assuming that fermentation will scrub some of the lemon flavor away, because I thought that 2 tablespoons would give it a subtle flavor, instead of in-your-face Pledge aroma.

UPDATE: 1/14/11 ~ I bottled a few days ago. The lemon flavor has really subsided. I bottled 3 gallons plain. I moved 1 gallon into secondary and added some dregs of Wyeast 3763 Roeselare Ale Blend, where it will sit for the better part of a year to develop some funk thanks to Brettanomyces, Lactobacillus, and Pediococcus. The final gallon was "casked" into my Cubitainer at 1.0 volumes of CO2 with the equivalent of 1 ounce of Amarillo dry hops and .5 ounces of light toast oak chips.

UPDATE: 2/17/11 ~ The beer is really nice! It came out better than I had expected. It isn't a true clone because the yeast created some peach/apricot phenols, but it works nicely in the beer. There is a tropical feel to it.

Support Your Local Brewpub

I probably wouldn't homebrew as often as I do if it weren't for the people at Haverhill Brewing Company/The Tap, my local brewpub in Haverhill, MA. Because of them and their respect for homebrewers, I am able to purchase sacks of grain at cost. What this boils down to is significant savings on my part.

I went today to pick up 55 lb. bags of Pilsen, Vienna, and Munich for a Flanders Red Ale that the Renegades of Funk are brewing over the Christmas Holiday. In total, it cost $102. To put that into perspective, to order the same grains from midwestsupplies.com, an online retailer that I use for pretty much every other homebrewing purchase because of their low prices, it would cost me $178.85 for the grain and another $79.57 for shipping. That is a grand total of $258.42.

That saved me $152. 42 and reduces my carbon footprint by buying it locally. My brewpub sold it at cost to me, therefore not making money off of that specific transaction, but while I was there I took the liberty to purchase five bombers of Joshua Norton, their exceptionally delicious and well made Imperial Stout. They sell bombers in-house for much lower than the liquor stores in the area and actually make more of a profit than if I were to buy it somewhere else. On another occasion, Evan and I ate lunch there and had 2 pints of beer each before we bought a bag of Marris Otter to brew our Imperial Stout. It seems like a win-win for all parties involved.