Brew Day - Extract of Daisy

This is actually a bit of a retrospective entry as I actually brewed this a couple of weeks ago.

This is a beer I've been meaning to brew for while. It's an attempt to get close to one of my favourite beers from the UK - Twickenham Fine Ales "Daisy Cutter". It's a beautiful, very pale ale with a lot of American hops, created by my good friend Tom Madeiros. My difficulties in recreating it in a homebrew setting here in New Zealand are twofold: as an extract brewer (rather than all-grain) it is very difficult to get pale beers as even the lightest malt extract is amber in colour by the time it gets here! Secondly American hops are in short supply worldwide, never mind here in NZ.

So, I was resigned to not brewing this beer until I went all-grain, by which point maybe we would also have some American hops available. However, in conversation with Mike Ellwood (from the excellent Brewers Coop homebrew store in Mt. Wellington, Auckland) he mentioned that he had some Weyerman's Pilsner Malt extract. Fairly pricey, but it might get me closer to the colour of Daisy Cutter. I've also started to seriously discover the native New Zealand hops, such as Motueka and Riwaka, so I decided to go for an all-kiwi hop ensemble.

Tom (the brewer from Twickenham Fine Ales) had very kindly given me some hints on the recipe so taking this into account I had a tinker around in my BeerSmith software package and came up with the following recipe:
4kg Weyerman's Pilsner Liquid Malt Extract
0.5kg Light Dry Malt Extract
0.25kg Wheat Dry Malt Extract
30g Pacific Jade hops @ 60 mins
30g Motueka @ 30 mins
20g NZ Hallertauer @ 30 mins
20g Motueka @ 5 mins
30g Riwaka @ 5 mins
2 packets Safale US-05 dried yeast

Here's a quick photo of the ingredients:

Everything went OK but I overestimated my top-up water after the boil so I have a larger batch size than I expected, but a lower original gravity (1.055).

The yeast kicked in very quickly and primary fermentation was completed in just over 3 days. It's currently undergoing secondary fermentation - I racked it off from the primary fermenter last weekend so I'll keep it at normal fermentation temperature for a couple of weeks before dropping it to 1 or 2 degrees centigrade for a few days to try and settle out as much of the yeast as possible before bottling.