Munich Malt experiment

We're up to brew number 18 at Cheshire Peaks. Most of our early brews were aimed at getting the hang of the all-grain brewing process, and for those we followed recipes (mostly from Brew Your Own British Real Ale by Graham Wheeler).

But since we've been at this over a year now we decided it was time to branch out, and make our own mistakes. We really wanted to start getting a feel for the characteristics of some of the specific ingredients of beer. Recently we made a couple of ales that were hopped with a single hop: Cascade followed by Nelson Sauvin. These were interesting (although we had a huge issue with clarity of the Nelson and we don't yet know why).

So... to malt. Previously we've just used the "classic" malts used in British Real Ale - pale ale malt (usually maris otter), crystal malt, and a little bit of chocolate and black malt. But there are many other malts out there with their own characteristics, which brought us to munich malt.

Munich malt is used in European beers - both ales and lagers. It's a darker grain than pale ale malt, because it has been kilned for longer. So what we are expecting is a darker, maltier and sweeter beer than a traditional British bitter. We've held right back on the hops as well to keep the bitterness low.

We used two thirds munich malt to one third pale ale malt and a little bit of Kent Golding hops during the boil. (I'd post more on the details of the recipe, but I've tagged this post as "General"!)

At the moment it's busy fermenting, and I'll post details of the results when it's ready to taste.

Blog audience

Hmm. I'm scratching my head a bit about who the intended audience is for this blog.

I'd like to write articles about the technicalities of brewing, because at the moment that's what light's my candle. But the reality is that if anybody does read this blog it's more likely to be friends and family (at least initially!), and you are probably not going to care about mash temperatures and BU/GU ratios.

Maybe I'll look at using the "labels" facility. I'll start with:

• General - of general interest to people that know me, and not full of brewing technicalities
• Technical - boring technical brewing stuff that no one will want to read

Welcome to the Cheshire Peaks Brewery blog!

Welcome! I've set up this blog to record the various activities of the Cheshire Peaks Brewery, a home brewery based in, err, Cheshire in the UK funnily enough.

Before I start though, let me make one thing very clear: this is not a commercial brewery. We may have a nice name (well, we like it anyway) and maybe even some names for our beers, but this is a home brewery and our beers are not available to buy. I thought I'd better make that clear from the outset - don't want anyone chasing us for excise duty! If you want to taste our beers you'll have to know us personally. And be nice to us.

So as far as introductions go, that's about it really. Anything else that appears on this blog will be as the mood takes me. Today we've been brewing an experimental ale based on munich malt. Basically because we've not used it before and we want to get our heads round what it tastes like. If you're lucky I will write a post on how we made it and what it tastes like. If you're unlucky I'll write several posts about it!

That's all for now.