Boil video

One thing I didn’t expand on in my previous post was the recipe for Bohemian Wrenbury. The malt bill is essentially Bohemian Pilsner malt, with a little bit of Carapils malt, which adds a little sweetness.

But the hops are the interesting bit – the style requires Saaz hops, which are a German hop variety with very low alpha acidity (about 3%). (For more info on what that means, see this post). Because of this you need a LOT of hops to get the required bitterness. In a normal ale brew we might add 50-80g of hops. Yesterday we used nearly 200g!

This had an interesting effect on the boil, because the kettle was just so flippin’ full of hops. We had to keep a very close eye on it because it kept pushing up a huge cake of hops, and was often close to overflowing.

I thought I’d see if I can publish a bit of video to this blog. It might not work, but if it does you can see what a “rolling boil” looks like with 200g of hops!