Ice Cream Ale, Better Bottles

We've been trying for a while now to get our batch of Cream Ale to freeze, but no dice. Now that it is warm in the basement, nothing we have will get cold enough. One of our fridges got under 32F, but I think it was going to take weeks to freeze the beer. Who has weeks to wait for beer? No one! So, we'll drink it as is. If it is no good, we'll have a beer pong party or something and get it gone.

Kegging the Cream Ale also gave us chance to see how easy it is to clean up a ported Better Bottle. The answer: very easy. The port made transfer to the keg a breeze and the bottle itself was so easy to clean. I highly recommend getting these bottles. Get the ported ones if you can, but even the un-ported would be a joy to use.

Batch #27 - Cream Ale

I don't know why they are called Cream Ales, as they are simply an ale version of an American Lager. I created this recipe from scratch based on the BJCP style guidelines.

My first solo Brew Day in a while went reasonably well, with the notable and serious exception of a very poor mash efficiency. Currently, I am blaming one of our thermometers (and myself of course). Our normal one was in use, so I used a backup and I suspect that it lied to me about my mash temperature. It could also be that my readings were in error.

That's the real problem - I don't know.

Anyway, if the mash was that weak we're going to end up with a pretty weak beer with a alcohol content of under 3%. This means that you could drink 5 of them and still land a Space Shuttle. Since I don't have a Space Shuttle, I've been trying to think of how to fix this beer and I had an idea:

Ice Beer. I can freeze out some of the water content which will concentrate both the taste and alcohol content of the beer. And, of course, the name of the beer writes itself:

Ice Cream Ale!