Another great brew day is finally in the books, and this time, the Cluster Fuggles homebrew club was here to help get it all put together!

Brew Bros Hops and Sprockets is putting on a club brew off where we were all given the same set of ingredients and instructions to make some tasty beers. Although I belong to two different local home brewing clubs, the Cluster Fuggles talked me into hosting their club brew day at my house on my system and things couldn’t have gone better.

First things first, we needed our ingredients and to come up with a recipe. We were given:

20lbs of Briess Pale malt
2lbs Caramel 40L
2lbs Victory malt
2lbs Carapils

4oz Medusa hops
4oz South African Queen hops
4oz El Dorado hops

And 2 packs of Imperial Flagship yeast

Seton, one of the new guys to the Cluster Fuggle brew club was kind enough to come up with our recipe for the brew day and I think the recipe he designed is going to be tasty as hell! He put together a fantastic sounding session pale ale recipe that should be a super easy drinker, but low enough in ABV to be able to have a few and not get sloshed at the same time.

Dank Spank Pale Ale recipe (80% efficiency):
Recipe type: All grain
Batch Size: 10.5 gallons
Original Gravity: 1.045
Final Gravity: 1.008
Boiling Time (Minutes): 60
IBU: 43.9
Color: 6.9 SRM

14lbs Pale Ale malt (Briess)
1lb Victory malt (Briess)
13.5oz Carapils (Briess)
8oz Caramel/Crystal malt 40L

1oz El Dorado (15% AA) boil 60 min
1oz Medusa (4.8% AA) boil 10 min
1oz El Dorado (15% AA) whirlpool 10 min
1oz Medusa (4.8% AA) whirlpool 10 min

2.0 pkgs Flagship (Imperial Yeast #A07)

Also, because my system runs at such a high efficiency, we were able to use up the remaining ingredients and do a second 5 gallon batch at the same time using up the remaining grain and a lot of the South African Queen hops. Bill was kind enough to haul his entire system over to the house so that we could make it a 15 gallon day and really get our money’s worth!

Not only did we have a great time, but EVERYONE showed up to help! We had new home brewers, seasoned home brewers and even pro brewers all at the same time! There was definitely no shortage of home brewing knowledge going around as well all gave each other a hard time and drink a ton of great beers.

Kenna and Dane Jasperson were great! They helped plan everything out, coordinated with everyone and brought some great food for us to munch on while we brewed.

Bill Pryor brought over his entire brewing set up so that we could brew the second batch and was generally just a great help with getting everything up and running. He also volunteered his new fermentation chamber so that we would be in complete control of our ferment temps.

Seton Bachle was the mastermind behind the Dank Spank recipe! He’s a new guy to this area and I think he’ll fit in just fine with the rest of us. Not only did he design the Dank Spank, he also designed a second recipe so we would have options. We wound up not using the second recipe, but it definitely looked like a solid beer!

Shawn Howard, Brandon Gunn and Caroline Gunn rounded out the rest of us. Between bringing tons of beer, double checking our work and generally just making fun of the rest of us, they were sure to make it a party! I’m not sure who it was that hid a Smirnoff Ice in the beer cooler, but I’ll definitely be serving up some Ice payback in the future!

Not only was it a great time brewing up a batch with old and new friends, we’ll all be drinking it soon with the company of all the other local homebrew clubs!