Axe Edge

I’d got it all worked out. We were supposed to be making Mow Cop Stout today. We’d designed the recipe, bought the ingredients, chosen the name and I’d even thought of a witty title for my next blog post (“We’re stout, and we’re proud!”)

Then Andy turned up brandishing a 1989 copy of Roger Protz’s Beer Almanac and waving the Owd Rodger page at me. We’ve been looking for a recipe for Marston’s Owd Rodger on the Internet for a while and had surprisingly little success. I don’t know why – there seem to be recipes for many many other well known beers out there. But not this one. And then Andy found the loosest suggestion of a recipe on Protz’s book: 73% pale ale malt, 10% crystal malt, 17% glucose; fuggles, goldings and “worcester” goldings hops.

So we quickly expanded that into a recipe we were happy with and luckily we had all the necessary ingredients. We got brewing.

For those that don’t know, Owd Rodger is a shockingly strong “old ale”. The original gravity is 1.080, which makes it about 7.6% ABV. Not to be taken lightly. In the old days we used to refer to it as the four horsemen of the apocalypse (because the fourth pint was death).

Anyway, today’s brew day went well, and we even came up with a suitably “dangerous” sounding name: Axe Edge. (And it’s even a Cheshire Peak too!)

Building up stocks for Christmas

It takes at least four weeks from brew day for a beer to be ready to drink, so November has been a busy time building up stocks for Christmas.

We started last Monday with Audlem Unusual, which is based on a well known “aged and strange” ale from Yorkshire. This is the third time we have brewed this beer, and we have not changed the recipe much from last time. It strong (about 5.5%), dark and malty. This time we have fermented it with Safale S-04 dry yeast, so we hope for a quick fermentation leaving a very clear beer. In a previous post I talked about the BJCP style Guidelines: technically this is categorised as an “old ale” by our American cousins, although I have never heard a British person use the term.

After that, we are planning to brew our first stout. This will be the first time that we have completely formulated our own recipe from scratch. Obviously we looked at a load of stout recipes and considered the ingredients that are generally used. The most significant of these is roasted barley. This is unmalted barley that has been roasted until black. It gives rich chocolate and coffee undertones to a beer, as well as an extremely dark colour.

The working name for this will be Mow Cop Stout – yes, we’ve actually got the name of a Cheshire Peak in there! In fact we have also planned out a number of other beer names we plan to use (along with the style they will be), but in an annoyingly tantalising twist… that will have to wait for another post! :-)

In other news: we bottled the weizenbock last Friday. Bottling is a tedious process compared to putting the beer in a barrel, but it does have a few advantages. Firstly, I am hoping we’ll get a higher level of carbonation in the beer (which we think is important to the style: the dunkelweizen from the barrel was just a little too much like a flat British ale). Secondly, it gives you a whole load more flexibility in terms of being able to store it for longer and drink it over a longer period without tying up a barrel and worrying about it going off. The bottles are currently conditioning in the house before they go into cooler storage in the garage.