Great British Brew Off–Cheshire Peaks leg

We had a successful brew day yesterday, brewing Whitbread's Porter for the Cheshire Peaks entry in the Great British Brew Off.

We had just one incident, which resulted in us liquoring back (posh name for letting down the wort with water) by far too much. The reason? There were so many hops in the boiler that the hydrometer wasn’t floating, it was balanced on the hops! So initially we read the post-boil gravity as 1.101! We liquored back accordingly, but when we thought about how much water we’d added it just didn’t add up. After checking the gravity properly (using a hydrometer jar) we found that we had dropped the gravity way past the target of 1.060 to 1.051. So what should be 6% ABV will only be 4.8%. Oh well. I hope it does not affect our comparison with Andy Bowers’s brew too much.

Spent grains in the mash tun.

 

Much hot break on the surface of this really dark brew.

 

One must always be impeccably dressed on brew day, don’t you think?

 

Skimmed off hot break scum.

 

LOTS of hops – 113g!

Labelling the Dubbel

We finally got up to date with bottle labelling today. We bottled the Belgian Dubbel a while back, but it has been sat without labels all this time.

Why did it take so long? Well partly laziness, sorry, needing to find time to get round to it. But also partly we kind of struggled with a suitable name and pithy description for the beer.

In the end we settled on “2x” for the name. (It’s a Belgian Dubbel – did you see what we did there?)

And for the pithy description: “A Belgian-style Dubbel, from Cheshire”. Not exactly sparkling with wit, but we also suspect it’s not going to be appearing on our first commercial pump clip anyway…

The Great British Brew Off

Our brewing friend Andy loves traditional (nay, archaic) brewing methods. He mashes for three and a half hours, and mucks about with stepping up the temperature at the end (known as a “mash out”).

I’m not convinced these methods are necessary these days. The modern malting process has been perfected over the ages resulting in “better modified” malts, which means they have a lot more enzymes available to convert the starch to sugar.

So, we wondered, does a three hour mash make any difference to the final beer? Indeed, do any of the other differences in our overall brewing processes make any difference?

And so The Great British Brew Off was born!

Both breweries will work to the same recipe (supplied by Andy, below). Andy will use his three and a half hour mash. Cheshire Peaks will use their standard one hour mash. And at the end we’ll have a hell of a lot of beer to drink!

Here’s the recipe we’re working to:

London Porter (1850) Whitbread's Porter Brewery London OG 1060

per gallon

2.25lbs Pale Malt

7oz Brown Malt

2.5oz Black Malt

1oz fuggles

It’s just like the “technical challenge”. :-)