UPDATE: American Brown Ale (HB#6) now dry hopping in secondary

Hops waiting in secondary

This past Monday (2/27/2012) I got around to transferring the hoppy brown ale I brewed into secondary fermentation. Two ounces of Centennial hops were added in order to soak for two weeks to create much more prominent hop aromas. It has been a week since the transfer and I will be ready to bottle in about one more, so this one is getting close to done.

The green looking foam is
the dissolved hop pellets.

As far as the style/name dilemma goes that I was having, I think it has been settled because of the larger than anticipate volume I ended up with. Unfortunately, I forgot to take a final gravity reading before pitching the yeast, but I did a rough calculation and found that the original gravity would have been around 1.062 instead of the anticipated 1.071 because of the extra gallon of water that didn't boil off. This means that there is a smaller concentration of sugar in relation to the volume, so the beer will subsequently be lower in alcohol (there is less sugar by volume for the yeast to convert into alcohol). An original gravity of 1.062 puts my brown ale within the parameters of an "American Brown Ale," so that is what I will refer to it as now. If all goes as planned from here, which clearly it has not up to this point, I should have a beer around 6.2% ABV (instead of 7.1% ABV) that will still hold up strong with malt and alcohol in balance with the eight and half ounces of hops used that will surely be on the forefront.