Brew Day - Our sessionable Harvest Amber

It's brew day at Levante!

Today we brewed the second generation of the very popular Harvest Amber. This is a balanced and smooth beer, with gentle hopping and clean caramel flavor. It's a simple malt bill, consisting of a pale malt backbone. A generous helping of crystal malt gives the amber it's deep red color and caramel flavor, and a little cara-pils is thrown in for body and head retention. One more specialty malt is thrown in for a flavor kick, but we'll keep that one as a trade secret. ;-)

Above: Tim doughing in...

Our small, yet well equipped house lab was updated with a new toy for this brew session. Check out our refractometer! Ok, maybe you aren't as excited about it as we are. Basically it allows us to take continuous samples throughout the brew and fermentation to measure sugar content (gravity). Plus, the samples can be just a couple drops rather than a full 6 ounces needed for a standard hydrometer. That's like wasting half a beer...ludicrous! Ok, that's it for the boring lab stuff...I promise.

Hanna Instruments Refractometer

Mini-lab

On to the boil. We collected about 12 gallons of wort in our kettle and fired things up. Standard 60 minute boil, and we lost just over a gallon to evaporation.

A generous helping of Horizon hops gives our Amber a citrus flavor up front, but the true star of the show is the blend of specialty malts. A continuous hopping schedule retains smoothness, while allowing subtle hop aroma and flavor to sneak in.

We decided to continuously hop this Amber to retain all the super-smooth drinkability and caramel notes. Did I mention we were shooting for smooth?

Enjoy a few session shots below. See you next time on the Levante Brew Blog.

-- Tim and Eric

Levante Brewing Co.

Specialty grains

Stir it up!

Mash temp is key

Refractometer time

Time for a cold one.....

#photo