Centennial Blonde Recipe

RECIPE FOR 5 GALLONS:

• 7 lbs Pale Malt, 2-Row
• 12.0 oz Carapils
• 8.0 oz Caramel 10
• 8.0 oz Vienna Malt
• 0.25 oz Centennial [10.00 %] – Boil 55.0 min
• 0.25 oz Centennial [10.00 %] – Boil 35.0 min
• 0.25 oz Cascade [5.50 %] – Boil 20.0 min
• 0.25 oz Cascade [5.50 %] – Boil 5.0 min
• 1.0 pkg Nottingham

There’s something I should have done a long time ago. And that is to brew the classic home brew style of Centennial Blonde. Cheers.

See, I’m gonna brew a Centennial Blonde, that beer style on home brew talk to with like 140 pages of discussion. Honestly, I feel a little bit like a charlatan and having never brew one of these. It’s supposed to be a pretty simple beer to make, but really quite rewarding despite the, uh, minimal effort required.

So I’m gonna mash these grains in here at 150 Fahrenheit or 66 Celsius, pretty straightforward mash. And I’m really not gonna do anything fancy here. There’s all sorts of different ways that you can brew this.

I am just going to do a simple, basic Centennial blonde to see how that turns out. And the first stage of that is a one hour mash.

Now, the original recipe has the original gravity at 1.039, just with sort of rounding up. My measurements signed up with a 1.043 recipe, but looking at around a 4 % beer.

And the base malt for this one is just 80%, two row. To that for a bit of added flavor I am adding 8% of carpils and rounding out the recipe with 6%, each of caramel 10 and Vienna malt.

Now Brian from short circuited brewers has sent me a beer that he brewed. It’s that New England IPA called ‘total eclipse of the Citra.‘ So let’s get this a try.

Well carbonated. That is a picture right there. Yeah. Getting that Citra aroma fruit tea, citrus orange, oh that’s really delicious, not too much of a hop bite, but you’ve got that those citrus qualities in the beer. Brian, this is a fantastic beer. Cheers. Thanks for sending it.

Now, something else I’ve never done that most home brewers have is sparge. Uh, with this brewing system it’s just not needed at least claw hammer recommend that you don’t need to do it. Um, but I figured why not give it a try? So the mash has completed after an hour, I have taken gravity reading and my mash temperature adjusted gravity reading is 10 44.

That’s actually higher than I want my original gravity to be. And I started to panic, but then I remembered that I have one gallon less water in here than I’m gonna finish with. And that’s because I’m gonna use one extra gallon to sparge. So that should bring the gravity down a bit, but I’m hoping the sparge will actually extract some sugars from this mash.

So here’s what I’m gonna do. I have been heating up some water to 170 Fahrenheit, and I’m gonna pour that one gallon of that over the top of these grains to really bring out any remaining sugars that we want to pull out of the grain.

Post sparge ended up at 10 40. So did that do anything? Did I extract anything from that? I mean it’s less, but I started with four gallons and got to 10 44. Then five gallons got me to 10 40. So more water. I don’t know.

Hops wise, well, they’ll just need two packets of hops, Centennial obviously, and cascade. And we’re really using very small amounts. We’re adding in four additions. Each will be 0.2, five ounces each.

So the schedule is Centennial goes in first at 55 minutes and 35 minutes. And then cascade is added at 20 minutes and five minutes.

Boil complete and cooled down to 70 Fahrenheit or 20 Celsius. Uh, my gravity reading, my final gravity reading is 10 44, which is really what I was looking for.

So sparge, no sparge, it seem to work.

Now for the yeast I’m using noting and yeasts as a dry yeast. And I have rehydrated it.

The recipe does call for rehydration. Uh, the way I did this is I added about a hundred milliliters of warm water. Um, actually just from the same water that I used for the sparge, I let it cool in here until it got to around sort of 30 to 35 Celsius, uh, added in the yeast. And it’s been sat here for about 50 minutes and, uh, ready to pitch in.

Fermentation with this is pretty quick, should take not much more than a week or so probably leave it in here for two weeks, move it to a keg. And then, Then this taste test.

So I have special guest. I have the co-founder of saints and devil’s brewery, my pretend brewery. Yeah, we set that up, 2016. I think, it seems like it’s longer than that. So 16 when we’ve got a brand on it, but what 14 when we started mucking around. Yeah. Like Brewer’s best kits.

Yeah. You’ve moved up in the world since then. Well down cuz you used to be up in the kitchen now you’re down here.

Got kicked out of the kitchen, down into the basement. Just sort of kept going. You don’t really home very much anymore, but now you are more of a, sort of a beer, a craft beer kind of collector of things. I’m more on the consumption side. I know I’ve got probably 500 different beer bottles and cans at home, but most of it’s barrelage stuff like stouts and barley wines.

Okay. So for today’s beer, this is Centennial blonde. All right. Classic thing, we never brew one of these, which is kind of surprising. First of all, we’ll uh, rate the beer on appearance.

It looks like I would want drink it on a hot day. I play a lot of tennis. So this could be a after tennis perhaps. We’ll see.

Yeah. So see if we get, uh, what we get on the aroma and see if some of these hops are coming through on quite a relatively hoppy beer.

Oh yeah. Yeah. That’s not trying to be nothing. That’s trying to be tasty and got some good aroma. So now I’m actually intrigued. I was initially thinking, wow, you’ve got me in for the, the blonde, the polar opposite at the end of a barley wine. So should we dive? Have a try. Yeah. Cheers.

The hops kick through in the back. That’s good.

To me. It’s like quite surprisingly hoppy in terms of bitterness.

I think a lot of people would really like this. If you said, said to them, try my home brew would be an easy win for a large crowd, cuz they’d be like, oh, it’s got some flavor.

It’s immediately beaten the baseline of like, you know, Buds, Coors, any of the light beers it’s way beyond that and taste profile, but they’re not sitting here thinking, oh this is your weird hobby to make beers that no one really wants to drink. I think this would be a perfect to, you know, sell people on home brew.

Yeah. And I think that’s just why it has become so popular for a lot of people’s first beer will be Centennial blonde and it’s pretty easy to brew as well.

Easy to brew apparently, but also half of it just disappeared. So it’s easy to drink also.

Well. Can you remember any of the uh, the beer names that we had?

Uh, yeah. Cuz we used to name them all after football or soccer. Um, oh there was the trebble triple I think, which was named after the Manchester United trebble. Yeah.

Okay. Debut para ale was our first. Three lion’s IPA playing the substitute.

Do you remember brewing that flying clone though? Yeah, we were way out of our depth in terms of handling that.

And yeah, we put so many hops in and then it, it got it to settle so that you could pour it without too much hop matter in the glass. And then if you so much as nudged the fridge, then it would just be in there for days again. Yeah, it was. Yeah, we totally out of our depth from that one, traditionally the, of these finish we do cheers.

I did a cheers when we started.

Okay. So I dunno if we can do, uh, empty glass cheers, butI don’t recall doing it empty glass. Cheers, but I’m gonna this a little bit left. Cheers!