Recreating Boddingtons

I’d love to be able to brew Boddingtons bitter, just like it was around Manchester when I was first into drinking beer. I don’t mean the horrible creamflow stuff in cans, I mean the wonderful “Cream of Manchester” brewed at the Strangeways Brewery before it sadly closed.

We’ve tried a couple of times, and while we made decent beer both times, it wasn’t quite Boddingtons. I remember it having a golden straw colour and a white white creamy head. The smell was straw-like, and the flavour was crisp, bitter and left you with an almost woody after-taste. That after-taste was critical – I’m not talking deep oaky, or heavy woody, I’m talking the sort of light woodiness of fresh wood shavings from a light wood.

OK, enough of my flavour ramblings…

To see if anyone else has any recipes, I posted to Jim’s Beer Kit forum. The helpful people there provided me with two recipes, one from Orfy and one from Seymour.

On Monday we brewed Orfy’s recipe, with the plan that we will brew Seymour’s next Monday, using the same yeast.

It’s currently fermenting happily, which gives me time to share the recipe with you.

Grain bill

Maris Otter    3300g (89.2%)

CaraPils        250g (6.8%)

Crystal 45L   35g (0.9%)

Pale crystal (30L)  85g  (2.3%)

Chocolate     30g (0.8%)

Hop Schedule

Northern Brewer  (8.4% AA) 32g  60min  (28 IBU)

EKG                    (5.4% AA)  22g  60min  (11 IBU)

EKG                    (5.4% AA) 25g flameout

Water treatment

In 32 litres, 2.5 tsp gypsum and 1 tsp CaCl

Yeast: WYeast 1318 London Ale III  (bought as an Activator pack, but made into a starter anyway, see photo below. The starter cleared nicely!)

Batch size: 23l

Mash temp: 66C

Strike vol: 12l

Mash time: 90 min

Sparge vol: 16l

Boil time: 60 min

Finings: Irish Moss, 3g at 10 min

OG: 1.038

IBU: 39

Colour: 5.7 Lovibond, 7 SRM, 14 EBC

Target FG: 1.010

Target ABV: 3.7%

According to Orgy’s recipe, the first EKG addition should have been at 45 min, but I put it in at the start by mistake.

Getting back to brewing

It’s been a long long time since we made any beer (25th November to be precise).

Why? Well over Christmas we had a glut of beers in keg. First we had our Old Horizontal clone, then Audlem Unusual (our Old Peculier clone), followed by the vanilla stout (a “small beer” made from the second runnings of the Rushton Imperial Stout).

Coupled with that, we were away over Christmas, so we didn’t have as many guests in the house to consume beer.

Anyway, we’re now down to a couple of inches of the vanilla stout, and that’s it. So Monday is going to be a brew day. We’re moving back towards lighter beers, but what we’re doing is going to be a bit of a project that I’ll describe in detail in a future post. For the moment, the starter is sitting in the kitchen, pretty much ready to go (see photo below).

In other news, we tried a bottle of the damson porter last week. I have to say we’re rather disappointed. Firstly, it has not carbonated very well (hardly at all). Secondly, the flavour is sharp and acidic. OK, so it does taste strongly of damsons (obviously), but that has imparted a sharp acidic edge. All we can hope is that it will ease off over time. And maybe the carbonation will improve a little too. If not, well I’ll probably be making a lot of steak and ale pies! You can’t win them all.