Summer Brew Sessions

Summer’s fast approaching, and with a big family reunion in December I need to start filling up the pipeline.  Most of the family like the typical shop-bought brands (Windhoek lager, Heineken, Grolsch, etc.) so I’m aiming for something quite simple in flavour, light in colour and served ice cold.

Here’s the potential list:

Beer	Recipe	Notes
Classic American Pilsner	Cream of 3 Crops Ale	Brewed this a year ago and it was absolutely fantastic! This is very drinkable even while it’s young.
English Pale Ale	Pride of Raubsville	Simple grain bill, just a pity I don’t have the hops.  I’m tempted to substitute with Fuggles and Styrian but we’ll see.
Light Hybrid Beer	Squeeze my Lemon Summer Blonde	Seems like a really clean recipe and the lemon zest sounds exciting.

I love simple recipes.  It seems that the more complicated a recipe the more difficult it is to get a good flavour profile from the recipe.  All 3 of the beers above have very basic recipes with very few twists.  About the furthest is the rice or lemon zest and those aren’t that bad anyway.

Each of the beers shares similar characteristics:

• Light in colour
• Light in alcohol
• Light in hops
• Not too much maltiness

Pretty much all simple, standard brews. I’ve seen the term “Lawnmower” beer used to describe them.  The one I’m most excited about is the CAP, but I’ll probably brew the Hybrid up first.  I’ve just added a braid manifold to my mash tun and don’t want to risk a stuck sparge just yet by using adjuncts.