Recreating Stocks Old Horizontal

When Andy was at university in the early 80s he used to drink a beer called Old Horizontal from the now defunct Stocks brewery in Doncaster. (This is not to be confused with a US beer with the same name from Victory Brewery, which is a very strong barley wine.)

Back when we first started making beer we had a go at recreating Stocks Old Horizontal based on the briefest of recipes from Roger Protz’s Real Ale Almanac. This was gyle (brew number) 7 in November 2010, so to be honest we didn’t really know what we were doing back then like we (think we) do now.

So we have decided to do it again. This post is about our decision making process on the recipe for tomorrow’s brew.

Let’s start with Andy’s “taste memory”. He dug the following up from the back of his mind:

• Looked like Guinness but not as black
• Relatively dry
• Not overly malty, not sweet malty
• Relatively bitter
• Not hoppy, no fragrance
• Not thin

OK, that’s a start. The Real Ale Almanac gives the following recipe:

• Original gravity 1054.7 (nice and accurate there!)
• 97% pale ale malt
• 3% chocolate malt
• Fuggles and goldings hops

There’s also a suggestion (here) that it was 5.3% ABV (although previously 5%).

This helps quite a lot, but doesn’t tell us anything about

• Bitterness
• Mash temperature (which affects final sweetness)
• Yeast (which has a big effect on flavour)
• Fermentation temperature (which also affects flavour, ie higher will result in more fruity beers because of the esters and the like produced as by-products)
• Hopping schedule – when they are added and how much (this affects bitterness but also hop flavour and aroma)

Back at gyle 7 we mashed at 64C – very low. We used 30g fuggles and 25g goldings for 80 minutes in the boil, followed by a further 10g fuggles in the last ten minutes. We used Safale S-04 yeast which would have given a fruity English flavour. It was November, so fermentation would have been at room temperature, 20C.

This time round we have made the following changes:

• Mash temp 66C – standard temperature for a dry beer
• 38 IBU – fairly bitter, but not aggressively so
• 25g fuggles and 25g goldings at 60 mins, and NO late hops, to reduce hop flavour and aroma
• Safale US-05 yeast – standard for beer where you do not want an English fruity flavour, such as American pale ales or Irish/Scottish ales
• No water treatment – Cheshire tap water

That’s it – we’ll brew it tomorrow and see if what we get is closer to Andy’s “taste memory”. I think the use of US-05 yeast and controlling the fermentation temperature to 19C will have the biggest effect – making it less fruity.

The full recipe is below, just in case that is of interest.

Stocks Old Horizontal

OG 1.054

FG 1.015

ABV 5.2%

Batch size: 26 litres

Malt

• 5000g maris otter pale ale malt
• 155g chocolate malt

Hops

• 25g fuggles (5.6% alpha acid) at 60 min (19 IBU)
• 25g goldings (5.2 alpha acid) at 60 min (19 IBU)

Water treatment: none

Mash schedule: 66C for 60 min

3g irish moss

Colour: 16 lovibond (21 SRM, 41 EBC)

Yeast: Safale US-05, 1 sachet

Fermentation: ~1 week at 19C

US Brewery Tours

I mentioned in a recent post that I’d talk a bit more about some of the beery things I got up to in my trip to the States last month. So here goes with a few words on two brewery tours.

Samuel Adams Brewery

Samuel Adams beer is made by the Boston Brewing Company. The easiest of their beers to find in the UK is Samuel Adams Boston Lager. The brewery opened in 1984 in Jamaica Plain, Boston, but there are now two other breweries (in Cincinnati and Breinigsville). Given the enormous output of the company, the original Jamaica Plain brewery seems extremely small – presumably it is only used for special and pilot brews, with the bulk of the beer being made in the other two breweries.This made the tour quite a quick affair – there’s basically only one large room which contains a mash kettle, mash tun, copper and six conical fermenters.

The tour was free, and very well attended considering we were on the first tour of the day. The tour guide gave us maybe ten minutes on how beer is made, with very little detail about the specifics of how Sam Adams beer differs from other beers. But that didn’t seem to bother the people on the tour – they lapped up the tour guide’s jokes and fooling around, and cheered frequently when there was mention of the free beer tasting to come. All a bit brash maybe for my reserved English sensibilities. :-)

The tasting part was actually a more detailed affair – he explained the importance of considering visual appearance and aroma when evaluating beer. And then he explained the flavours to look for.

As far as the beers are concerned, what I love about Sam Adams beer is the huge range of different styles from around the world that they have assimilated into their range. For example, every year they brew an Octoberfest, which is eagerly anticipated by beer fans and for good reason: it’s rich, malty and flavoursome but with a clean, crisp lager finish.

Rock Art Brewery, Vermont

We stayed in Stowe, which is in the middle of the skiing area of Vermont. Within 10 miles of Stowe there are seven craft breweries, so we had to visit one. Almost randomly, we chose the Rock Art brewery in Morrisville. I say “almost”, because we had tried a few beers and they were very good.

The brewery is probably similar in size to the Sam Adams brewery in Boston, but of course this is their only location. At the front of the brewery building is a tasting bar and gift shop. At the bar you can purchase a “flight” of four draught beers, chosen from the range of about 10. These range from hugely hoppy IPAs and double IPAs, through to a brown ale, a porter and a massively challenging barley wine called “The Vermonster”.

The tour was essentially a ten minute chat with one of the brewers in a room overlooking the brewery floor. He was knowledgeable and very willing to answer my damn stupid questions about yeast strains and barrel aging, which was good. The barrel aging (see photos) was particularly interesting to me – this is clearly something that they enjoy experimenting with. The results are (presumably) pretty variable, depending on the barrels used and the length of aging, which I suspect means fans of the brewery are treated to different beers every year. I like that: keep your customers coming back with constantly changing beers.

So that’s it. Thanks to my best mate Ian for taking me to these breweries. Next time he can keep his promise of taking me to Framingham Beer Works. :-)

Blackbeery Blonde label

My eight year old daughter insisted that SHE was going to choose the name and design the labels for our latest batch of beer, the fruit blonde ale. So a few days ago I let her loose on CorelDraw, and this is what she came up with.

The name came about because of a typo made by me whilst saving the image. Abi spotted the typo and shouted “keep that, that’s what we’re calling it”.

She spent a lot of time on thesaurus.com hunting down an alliterative synonym for “tasty”.

And the supermarket joke was again Abi’s, a reference to the mixed dark fruit we used to make the beer taste rather like Vimto. ;-)

So that’s another job done thanks to my enthusiastic helper, and forty bottles are sitting in the garage awaiting consumption. Thanks Abs!