Homebrew - Newcastle Brown Ale Clone

In honor of my little brother coming to stay for Christmas I decided to clone his favorite beer. Everything went pretty smoothly on brew day but I tried to be as quick as I could because I wanted to also brew the Graff. I made a big starter for it using washed yeast from the London Pride. One cock up was not remembering when to put the Irish moss into the boil. Rather than look it up I used my memory and thought it was 5 minutes at the end of the boil, it should be 15 minutes. To compensate I let the boil go 5 minutes longer, I did not want to do a full 15 because I was not sure what would happen to the flavor by boiling longer.

Ingredients: Newcastle Brown Ale, Extract clone kit from Austin Homebrew Supply
Starter:     01 Nov 2011
Brew:        05 Nov 2011, OG 1.056
Rack:        19 Nov 2011 (14)
Bottle:      27 Nov 2011 (8), FG 1.020, ABV 4.89%
Ready:       19 Dec 2011 (22) 
Summary:     Primary 14 days, Secondary 8 days, Condition 22 days

The Pepsi challenge here was what my brother thought compared to his favorite beer (real Newcastle). He was in his words 'pleasantly surprised' by how good it turned out (cheeky bugger). We drank about half of the bottles over Christmas and it went down very easily. It turned out dark but very clear, it was quite malty and did not have some of the stronger homebrew flavors I am trying to avoid. It was not exactly the same as the real thing but it was in the ballpark. The main difference was the homebrew having a stronger flavor overall, it almost made the real Newcastle taste watery. Our only problem was the stink it made us make, wives and fiancees were not best impressed, we tried to blame the dogs of course.

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