We’re stout, and we’re proud!

On Tuesday we brewed “Mow Cop Stout” – a stout to our own recipe formulation. If you’ve been reading this blog regularly (is anyone actually DOING that??), you’ll have noticed that we have been brewing a great deal of dark beers recently. This is probably the last in that line: we’re starting to think about slightly lighter beers for drinking in the new year. But for now, dark, dark, dark.

And boy will this one be dark! I’ve never seen such thick black wort running out of the mash tun. One of the most common ingredients in stouts is roasted barley. This has a very dark brown colour and imparts a burnt, coffee-like flavour and a dry graininess. A bit like a rather well known stout. We’ve added plenty of chocolate malt too, which will hopefully make it a slightly sweeter, richer beer than its well-known cousin.

One last boring beer-making observation on our brew day: we completely forgot to add any minerals to our water! Usually we would add gypsum (calcium sulphate), calcium chloride, magnesium sulphate and common salt (sodium chloride) in varying quantities in order to emulate the mineral content of the area from which our target beer style comes from. This helps to adjust the mash acidity (so it mashes correctly) and also assists in enhancing flavour. Generally speaking, chlorides will enhance maltiness (think adding salt to food as a flavour enhancer) and sulphates will enhance the bitterness. So in theory you should be able to adjust minerals to compliment your style… only this time we were in such a rush to “mash in” we completely forgot the minerals! So, we’re treating it as an experiment… can we notice any difference? Time will tell. Many brewers don’t bother with water treatment anyway, so whatever happens we hope we’ll get something drinkable!

One last thing – in case you don’t know, Mow Cop is a lump of rock that sticks up out of Cheshire south of Congleton. On the top is Mow Cop Castle, a folly built in 1754 by the owner of a local hall (Rode Hall) as a summerhouse and to give an interesting thing to look at on the horizon from his house.

PS This time I managed to use my obscure Not The Nine O'clock News quote for the blog post title! See this post for why that matters!