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.