We brewed a special bitter last Monday. This is a very simple recipe, based on a recipe we found for Samuel Smith’s Museum Ale. It contains only pale ale malt and crystal malt (quite a lot, 10%). It uses the two classic English hops: fuggles (for bitterness) and goldings (for flavour and aroma).
We wanted to strip things back to their basics, just to see what we get. We are hoping for a medium strength (4.5% ABV) mid-coloured bitter, with plenty of body, some sweetness and classic English hop flavours: floral, fruity and earthy.
I suggested calling it Quarry Bank Bitter (well, it’s a local museum isn’t it?), but we’re not sure if that will stick or not.
Whilst we were brewing we were chatting about other hops varieties, and I mentioned that I had recently bought a pack of Bramling Cross hops. This is another English variety, but much less commonly used. When we looked up the flavour profile, we discovered that is it supposed to have a strong spicy and blackcurrant flavour and aroma. This has to be investigated, so our next brew will be a single-variety hopped bitter using Bramling Cross.
In planning the beer, we considered what flavours would work well with a spicy blackcurrant flavoured hop. It needs to have some darkness to it, and perhaps a slight chocolatiness to work with the sharp blackcurrant flavour. But we don’t want it dark, sweet and chocolaty like Audlem Unusual. I had also recently bought some pale chocolate malt, which as the name suggests, is a toned down version of chocolate malt. It is described as “toasty rather than roasty”, which sounds ideal.
So there it is… we’re aiming to brew it a week on Monday.
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