Here’s the McEwan’s Scotch Ale clone we made a few days back. This should be an interesting one.

Ingredients:
12oz 60° L Crystal Malt
2 oz. Roasted Barley
2 oz. Smoked Malt
3.3 lb. Light Malt Extract
1.75 lbs Light Dried Malt Extract
8 oz. Corn Sugar
4 oz. Cane Sugar (I used Sugar in the Raw turbinado sugar)
2.5 oz. East Kent Goldings hops
0.5 oz. Fuggles hops
1 tsp. Irish Moss
1 Package Wyeast 1728 Scottish Ale Yeast

Procedure:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Step	Time	Instruction
1	X	Place the bag of malt extract into hot water to make them more manageable.
2	X	Add 3 gallons of water to the brewing pot. Raise temperature to 150 degrees F.
3	X	Process the malts and barley in the food processor lightly to crack them. Add them to muslin bags and tie the bags closed.
4	19:01	Place the bags into the water and allow the grains to steep. Maintain the temperature at 145 – 150 degrees F.
5	19:21	After 20 minutes, sparge with 2 gallons of hot water. Discard the grain bag.
6	19:31	Add the malt extract, dried malt extract, and sugars to the pot.
7	X	Stir the pot until the malt extract is completely dissolved. Make sure no extract remains on the bottom of the pot.
8	X	Restart the burner and bring the pot to a boil.
9	X	Place 1 oz. of EK Goldings hops into a muslin bag.
10	20:01	When the pot begins to boil, add the EK Goldings hops to the pot.
11	X	Monitor the pot for the first 10 minutes to make sure it does not boil over. If it appears ready to boil over, turn down the heat.
12	X	Place 1 oz. EK Goldings hops into a muslin bag.
13	20:46	45 minutes after the pot has started boiling, add the EK Goldings hops and Irish moss to the pot.
14	X	Place 1/2 oz. of EK Goldings and 1/2 oz. of Fuggles hops into a muslin bag.
15	20:56	55 minutes after the pot started boiling, add the EK Goldings and Fuggles hops and Irish Moss to the pot.
16	21:01	Five minutes later, turn off the heat.
17	X	Cool the pot as quickly as possible.
18	21:16	When the temperature of the wort is below 90 degrees F, pour it into the fermenter. Stir vigorously.
19	X	When the fermenter temperature is at 70 degrees or below, pitch the yeast.

Again, this recipe came from Clone Brews. I’m not too sure about the large addition of sugars – it tends to go against a lot of what I learned in basic homebrewing; however, I’ll allow that it may be necessary to achieve the balance of flavors required by the style. We were slack and forgot to pop the yeast packet until about 7 PM, so it was barely going when we pitched it two hours later. This meant that fermentation was slow to get going, but this has had a surprising side-effect – although a good bit of foam has been generated, there’s been no blowoff whatsoever. In fact, if it makes it through to tonight without any rise in foam, I’ll probably slap an air lock on it tomorrow.

Incidentally, both Tobermory Scotch Ale and the Iditarod Stout are destined to be kegged and served at Midwest FurFest. Interested in trying some? Talk to me at Registration and we’ll see what we can do. (Hmm, a homebrewer’s gathering? There’s a thought.)