Home Brew Beer

Well hello.

I have waited until the proscribed date and will be assessing soon!

How did these Philter clones go??

I am back on the homebew train. I have been finding things in my garage and selling them with the intention to purchase a Robobrew.

I really enjoyed the XPA I did - not sure it was all that close to the Philter version, but I did use a Balter malt bill with Philter hops.

I think Beaker found a Philter recipe, so he may have got close.

I had some success the other day - my mash efficiency has always been a bit lacklustre, so I usually scale up the malt bill to suit. Well wouldn’t you know I managed an 80% efficiency with my last mash, so my Irish Red Ale which should be around 5.2% will probably be closer to 7%!

bloody love a good irish red ale though!

Before I go and shell out for the Robobrew, I am going to give the extract a go again. Keep it simple and see how it tastes. If you have any suggestions on the below, shout out!

Recipe below:

Single Hop Ale

250g Carapils - Anything I can substitute with Gladfield malts?
3kg Dried Light Malt Extract


  • Calypso or
  • Citra

Wyeast 1056 American Ale

  1. Get 10L water temp up to 65C steep Carapils for 30 min
  2. Strain malts
  3. Add 1kg dried light malt extract, bring to the boil
  4. Add 30g hops for 1hour 10min total boil time
  5. Add 1sp Protofloc last 15min of boil
  6. Add 30g hops for last 10min of boil
  7. Add 1.5kg light malt extract for the last 5 minutes
  8. Cool wort to 20-24C, transfer to fermenter and top up to 23L.
  9. Pitch yeast
  10. Dry hop 50g

Using an online Calculator, this should give me about 33 IBUs

You could probably use a pilsner malt if you want to use Gladfield malts - if I’m understanding you correctly. Carapils is 5.5-6.5 EBC as a starting point, you’ll just need to find something to match.

Make sure you’re grain is crushed.

Citra and Calypso hops have a high Alpha Acid content, so 80g boiled for 70 minutes will blow your IBU out to 127! It should be closer to 20g: https://www.brewersfriend.com/ibu-calculator/

Put your aroma hops in after your boil or even when your wort cools down to 80 degrees. All you’ll be doing is boiling off the wonderful aromas.

I’d put all your DME in for the full boil time.

Not sure what line item 8 is.

Feel free to ignore anything or everything I said.

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I have Mr Antmandan on the hotline and he pointed out that my hop amounts were a bit high. Hahaha.
I was using that calculator which didn’t allow for the fact that I was only boiling 10L with 1kg of the malt.

NOTE: I only have a 10L boiling pot.

Im guessing the low IBU count is from the low isomerization of the alpha acids in the hops due to the pretty thin wort until the last 15min. That said, 33 still seems crazy low for a 70min boil of any hops. I would do a small charge around 45min of a 45min boil then use the rest of the hops in the last 15-0 minutes of the boil. EDIT: Oh, wow, only a 10L boil? Yeah, 30g is way way too much for that long.

Far as the Carapils sub. Gladfield Gladiator Malt seems to be the equivalent. Carapils just adds dextrin and supposed to help with foam stability. If foam stability is all you want, Id go for a bit of flaked wheat or flaked barley, unless you want the touch of added sweetness.

Spot on with the Gladiator. I just called the homebrew shop to see if they had anything that I can swap out the Carapils with… thats what they suggested, but they don’t have it in stock.

This is the recipe I am bastardising. The version I am using is down the bottom left there.


It does have a note in the book “It assumes you will be boiling 27L of water in a large pan. If you wish to work with a smaller volume, boil 10L of water adding 1kg of dried malt extract at the start of the boil. Add the balance of malt extract in the last 5 minutes"

I hope your pot is a bit bigger than 10L if you’re planning a 10L boil! Should be about 15L pot ideally.

Malt in whatever form needs at least 15 min boil to sterilise, at least it does in my world.

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In most home brew instances you are sanitising rather than sterilizing, the effect is the same, reducing the load of non wanted microorganisms.

I thought sterilising was preferable over sanitising, but to be honest I’m not sure if that’s fact or just something I made up.


Sanitising is a process that destroys microorganisms, reducing the numbers present on
a surface to a safe level. This is usually achieved by the use of both heat and water, or by
specific sanitising chemicals (detergents are generally not sanitisers).

Sterilising is a process designed to destroy all microorganisms including microorganisms that have
formed a protective coat (spores). The standards do not require eating and drinking utensils and food
contact surfaces to be sterilised.

Only way you can sterilize wort would be to autoclave it. Sanitizing is is more than enough for a batch of homebrew. Hell, even in bigger breweries, we just ran 85+C water off the boiler through already cleaned (with caustic) lines, valves, etc. The same method is used through a cleaned CIP spray ball to sanitize fermenters. Would be a hell of a lot of work running something like starsan into a 150BBL fermenter.

For lab work though (checking yeast cultures, etc.), media gets claved.

Sterilising is preferable but in reality is not practically achieved in most homebrew situations, the aim is always to minimize the amount of randoms to get the yeast in the dominant position.

edit: also what beercyclist said

Yeah, the pot is around 14-15L. It’s not the best pot either. I am just using this as an experiment to see if I really need that $400 machine in my life. If I can make an okay beer with a small pot on my induction stove, then I might spend a bit on just a better pot.



Fair enough. I guess I’ve always put my irish moss, yeast nutrient and immersion chiller in the boil for at least 15 minutes, so for me that’s the minimum sanitising time.

Most bugs in wort will be dead within a minute or so at boiling temps. However, for the immersion chiller, as its less likely to be perfectly clean going in anyway, and adds a ton of surface area, so its probably a good idea to boil at least 10min. For home brew, I do the same. Outside of trying to grow pure cultures of yeast, a good clean and quick sani are plenty on a 20ish liter scale. Worst that happens is you lose a few bucks and a couple hours of work.

Come on, pull the trigger, nothing better than all grain brewing!

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