If you haven't had 21st Amendment's Bitter American then the name of this beer is pretty odd. Obviously it has a chimp, not a monkey, on the label. But for whatever reason I named it Bitters the Monkey. The name of the first chimp we shot into space was Ham the Chimp, which partly (but not entirely) explains the Ham Sandwich name.
Over the summer I became quite fond of low-gravity pale ales -- nice, crisp refreshing beers somewhere between 4 and 4.5% ABV. It's a surprisingly under-served market around here. One of the best is 21st Amendment's, but for some perverse reason it's their winter seasonal, available from January to March. What a weird time to sell that kind of beer! Hence this recipe, my attempt to clone Bitter American so that I can have it any time I please.
The biggest hitch today was a stuck mash due to a loose connection in the false bottom. To fix it I moved the mash into a bucket, reassembled the false bottom and then put the mash back in the MLT. This led to a very cloudy wort and the most protein-laden boil I've ever seen (the 4lb of American 2-row helped to up the protein as well, I'm sure). The protein-filled boil led to almost twice as much trub as I normally get, which led to a low fermenter volume. So if this beer is great I'll have about 3 fewer quarts of it than I wanted. But I can always make more.
I'm going to try a new dry hopping process with this batch. I like doing two separate dry hop additions, but I hate opening the keg to swap the bags. With this batch I'm going to use my closed transfer system to move the beer from the fermenter into a keg that contains the 12 day dry hop addition. I can then put the 5 day addition in another keg and do a closed transfer of the beer from the first keg to the second. Once that dry hop addition is done I can do a final closed transfer into a final keg. Probably excessive, but I'm digging the closed transfer approach.