First Brew - Palm Pale Ale

The OCBC's inaugural brew was the Northern Brewer AK47 Pale Mild kit with specialty grains. Since we are down in Florida and we brewed it on Palm Drive, we dubbed it the Palm Pale Ale. This beer was perfect to to give everyone an idea of what we were getting ourselves into, and we only had to wait 4 weeks to reap our reward.

The brewing was easy, but with it being our first time we were overly cautious and double checked every step. We started by soaking the 0.5 lbs Simpsons Caramalt and 1 oz Fawcett Pale Chocolate in 5 gallons of water until it reached 170 degrees. We then brought it up to a boil and added 3 lbs Munton’s Light dried malt extract. I think that I love smelling the boiling wort almost just as much as I do drinking beer. It was an awesome aroma that was spread throughout the house, and the Brew Club enjoyed taking peeks under the kettle lid and sipping on good brews.

Once the malt was stirred in and boiling, we were ready for the 60 minute hop boil with 0.75 oz East Kent Goldings for 60 minutes and 0.25 oz East Kent Goldings at the last15 minutes of the boil. We then finished it off with 1 lb corn sugar before we began chilling the wort down to 70 degrees. Luckily we invested in a copper wort chiller and had access to a bunch of ice packs, because cooling down 5 gallons of boiling hot liquid took just as long as getting it up to boil (about 45 minutes)! We bought the Wyeast 1945 NeoBritania smack pack and pitched it, aerated it by hand, and sealed it up.

What we learned from the first batch...
The first thing that we didn't do properly was popping the internal yeast pack of the smack pack. We smacked it, and it appeared to swell up, but it did not break the pouch and the yeast expanded from the warmer temperature. We pitched the yeast anyway, and it did work.

We also forgot to add the sugar to the wort, before we had already chilled it down to 70 degrees. It would have been ideal to mix it in when the water was boiling, but it slipped our mind as we were being attentive to sterilization and keeping the steps straight. Again, we did add the sugar and it apparently dissolved fine and had no bearing on the brewing.


I really didn't know what to expect after we placed the carboy in one of our "single" chillers, but it was like waking up on Christmas morning 8 hours later. One of my dogs woke me up early that morning and I heard a bubbling/thumping sound that I had never heard before. My first thought was that we had a leak in my house, but then I remembered the fermenting beer and the bubbler airlock we had used. I rushed to open the chiller and saw and heard the glorious sound of yeast multiplying, converting the sugars into alcohol, and producing CO2 that was bubbling through the lock. it was an awesome feeling of success.

The brew fermented for 2 weeks and then we bottled it and left it to condition and carbonate. When that 2 weeks was up, we chilled them and then got to experience the feeling of drinking a beer that we had made ourselves.

True, most mild beers are like little brown ales, but pale versions have existed and still do exist. This beer is an homage to one of the "relatively" famous ones, Sierra Nevada Pale Ale, but we felt that it turned out to taste quite a bit like a Sam Adams Light . It was lightly hopped and light-bodied, but not at all boring. The beer was ready to drink quickly, obligingly chuggable, and remarkably complex for barely 3% abv.