Single hop ales

[Motorbikeman]

 I am finding it a little hard to tell hop tastes apart as every brew I have done so far has had a mixture.   

I have an unopened pack of saaz hop cones that I was going to use in a 100% maris otter  and brew with english ale yeast. 

Maybe another with Hallertauer

Is this a waste of time?   Will I end up with a bucket of crap for my days work. 

All the recipes I have followed so far has used a speciality grain in the recipe which is great,  but I don't know what it has done without a plain ale to compare it to. 

[Tom]

Change your yeast to a lager yeast and make a nice Pils with those ingredients. Loads of beers (Pilsner Urquell) are single hop, single malt beers (SMaSH), and it's a great way to get to know your ingredients.

Follow the usual rules from formulating recipes (balancing hop bitterness and so on) and you'll have perfectly fine beer, and a good springboard for future brews.

[mr hoppy]

Bitter and Twisted is a nice UK ales with noble hops in it. I'm sure there's others.

Personally, I love saaz in anything.

[Motorbikeman]

It's not a waste of time, though keep it simple, and split batches if you can. i.e. don't brew one big batch of 20L, but split the batch into 2 x 10L or smaller if you can.

Yeah I could do that with those 5L plastic water bottles  and boil 2 batches.   

They would also fit nicely into my brewing fridge for lager yeast. 

gallon batches of saaz lager and ale and Hallertauer lager and ale. 

Thats the weekend sorted 

Just one thing,  can I brew lager with pale ale grain? 

[Tom]

Just one thing,  can I brew lager with pale ale grain? 
[/quote]

'Course you can!

[Motorbikeman]

So I brewed this. 

http://www.brewmate.net/recipes/T6CqqVxpK1ywKPIL0t8A.xml     

But im having a problem with my brews and now I have 4 all grain brews under my belt , it time I started trying to figuer out the snags I am having. 

Every brew I have done so far has had a LOW OG  . 

This one came in around the 1.042 mark.  I was expecting  1.047.

I have used my meter on kits and it comes up perfect and sits at 0.998 in tap water so I think its in the ball park where it is supposed to be. 

I had to add extra water

I had to top up by 2L+ to give me my 20L batch. 

First water addition was the sparge.  1l of hot sparge water was added as the grain soaked up more than the Brewmate program said it would.

second water addition was after the boil as the rolling boil took 1 extra liter than the program said it would. 

I am aware that adding extra water can possible lower the OG  . 

But how do I adjust the settings on the program to work with my simple yet workable setup

Has efficiency setting got anything to do with it?