Near Pon Ned

     Mirror Pond Pale Ale, or “Mir Pon” as it’s known by Oregonians, is brewed by the Deschutes Brewery in Bend Oregon and is my favorite beer in the whole world. Unfortunately they don’t distribute out here in Massachusetts so my Mir Pon supply is limited to what I can smuggle in my checked luggage (because, of course, we can’t bring beer on planes anymore). This is unacceptable, so I’ve decided to take stab at brewing my own. Naturally Deschutes doesn’t give out the recipe and I don’t have access to fresh Cascade hops or snow melt from Mt. Bachelor, but the Internet is full of recipes that attempt to replicate this beer. Keeping a journal of your homebrews is the key to making better beer, so I name my beers to make it easier to keep track of them. I’m calling this one “Near Pon Ned” (last time I brewed “Albert the Altbier”).
     Mashing grains at home is beyond my abilities (and time constraints) at the moment, so I make my beers using the extract method. The four ingredients of beer are: water, barley, hops, and yeast. The extract method uses barley, but instead of mashing it, malt-extracts are added to the brew pot after extracting the crystal (crushed malted barley). For this clone, I am brewing a five gallon batch based on a recipe I found at skotrat.

Here goes...
Heat 4 gallons of Cambridge Tap Water to 150 °F

Add the crystal malts

Heat for 30 minutes on the way to 170 °F

Add the malt extracts and gypsum and bring to a boil. I always screw something up. This time I added three times as much gypsum as I meant to. I should have added one teaspoon, but I added one tablespoon--d’oh! Sulfate should be kept below 450 ppm and mine is around 775 ppm.

Remove the lid and add the bittering hops

After 30 minutes... More bittering hops!

During the last five minutes, finishing hops are added, then the wort chiller is submerged in the brew pot to bring it to 70 °F as quickly as possible (10 minutes in the winter)

The cooled wort (wort is the the name given to the mixture that will be fermented) is then transfered to the primary fermenter, diluted to five gallons (churning as much air into it as possible), and the yeast is pitched

     Now we wait... The Original Gravity--the measure of density relative to water--was 1.041, which is 0.009 less than the recipe cited. This could mean that I didn’t extract the crystal completely, or that I should have added more malt extract (Clo made some cake from the leftover, so maybe it is better this way). I don’t have a picture of the primary fermenter because it is just a plastic bucket with a heater strapped to it (to keep it above 70 °F so the yeast won’t go to sleep). Next weekend I will rack (wrack?) Ned to the secondary fermenter for dry hopping. One week after that, it will be time to bottle!