First Contract Beer Brewed

Yesterday I brewed my first "contract" brew. Several people in one particular group of friends were upset that they could never seem to get any beer I make, so I offered to brew a batch just for them.

This is a straight clone of Sierra Nevada Celebration Ale, with two slight modifications.

It should be an excellent winter warmer.  It will be bottled, so if anyone can start to think of names, let me know!  Labels should be fun.

For the brewing-minded, this is a no-sparge 6 gallons batch scaled down from a 10 gallon recipe.  The efficiency of my system is such that most 10 gallons recipes will scale down to exactly 6 gallons without altering the grain bill.

It uses America Two-row malt, american crystal 40L, and american carapils.  Chinook hops for bittering, and a lot of cascade at the end of the boil. Centennial and Cascade will dry hop.  This is straight from the Sierra Nevada page.

The two modifications I made are -

I did not sparge this batch.  I did this for two reasons.  First, I want to enter this beer in a competition in February, and my best results for beer seem to come from no-sparge batches.  Second, I brewed with prepared water instead of filtered tap water, and I didn't want to lift all the water to the top of my hot liquor tank!

The second modification was yeast.  There seems to be debate over which strain Sierra Nevada used for Celebration, but I don't have good luck with the Chico yeast at all.  So I split this into <a href="Danstar">http://www.lallemand.com/Brewing/eng/PDFs/Fiches%20NOTTINGHAM%20av03.pdf">Danstar Nottingham (caution PDF)</a> and <a href="Safale">http://www.dclyeast.co.uk/DCL_Main/main_brewing/homebrew_index.htm">Safale 04</a>.  I have extremely good luck with both of these strains.  In particular, I brewed a Sierra Nevada Pale Ale clone for a "mini" competition last year, and submitted the same beer fermented with both Nottingham and Chico (WY1056) yeast.  The dry yeast came in first, the Chico second.  That convinced me.