Recipe: American Amber Ale

Every beer enthousiast knows what a Pale Ale is. Siblings Amber and Red Ale are less well-known. As the name implies American Amber Ale is an amber to reddish, moderate-strength ale that uses American style hops. It should have a balanced, malty, caramel flavour.

Original gravity: 1,045 - 1,060

We want to create a dark, malty, caramelly beer, but without chocolate and roasted flavour. To achieve this, we will mostly use base malt. For this recipe, we chose Swaen Ale. The deeper taste palette and amber colour are acquired by adding Swaen Munich Dark and caramalts Gold Swaen Amber and Gold Swaen Brown. This will give hints of caramel, bread and toffee, and will also balance the hops. For a full bodied beer, feel free to go only for alpha-amylaze rest at 69˚C (156F) and hold for 50-60 minutes.

With moderate to high hoppiness, we don't want to increase IBU. All we need is a perceptible hop flavour, with hints of citrus, pine and tropical. For this recipe we worked with Cascade, but Centennial or Amarillo are excellent replacements. This style doesn't need dry-hopping.

Being an American beer style, we want to respect the ale yeast strain. Good examples are Fermentis Safale US-05, LalBrew BRY-97 or Gozdawa US West Coast Chico. We don't want strong esters, so try to keep fermentation temperature at the advised level.

Batch size: 19 L (5 gallon)

Medium body and hoppiness, rich in caramel and toffee aroma.

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