Oh my goodness, has it been six months since I last wrote a beery blog post? Looks like it. Why? Well, no particular reason to be honest. Andy and I have still been making beer but for some reason I’ve just not had the time and/or inclination to blog about it.
So here is a quick post to get me started again. I guess the best thing for me to do is re-cap the last six months of brewing as briefly as possible, then I can take up with more specific articles about what we’re doing now.
Gyle 80 Mosaic SMaSH beer (June)
This was our first true “Single Mash and Single Hop” (SMaSH) brew, used to provide a simple beer to allow us to try some Mosaic hops. The recipe was simply 5kg of Maris Otter malt, mashed at 66C. Mosaic hops were added to the boil at 60 min (15g), 20 min (20g), 10 min (20g) and flame out (20g). The remaining 25g of hops were used to dry hop the beer in the keg. Yeast was Safale S-04, fermented at around 19C (keep it cool to keep it clean!).
Any good? Depends who you ask. If you ask me, the answer is “oh my god yes!” I love American hops, and Mosaic is right there up with the best in my opinion. Forthright, aromatic and deeply flavourful, without being aggressive. However Andy didn’t touch a single pint of this beer. (“Nasty, horrible, pine fresh”).
Gyle 81 Gin Wit (July)
OK, this one was a bit experimental. We both love gin, so we wanted to try some gin botanicals in a beer. We decided to make a wit (lager malt, wheat malt, torrified wheat, munich malt and some porridge oats) and add juniper berries (20g, 10 min), lemon zest (15g, 5 min) and grains of paradise (5g, 2 min).
Any good? No, not especially. I mean it was drinkable, but the botanicals just didn’t “pop” out of the beer. Muddy and confused flavours. Back to the drawing board on that one I think.
Gyle 82 Flyer (September)
Another SMaSH beer, this time with Flyer hops. Same recipe as above.
Any good? Well Flyer is a much less assertive hop than Mosaic. What we ended up making got branded “pub beer” by the drinking committee. It was light in colour and strength, and just a tasty quaffable beer.
Flyer is a brand new British hop (http://www.britishhops.org.uk/flyer/) described as “citrus, stoned fruits, liquorice, treacle-toffee and caramel”. I didn’t get a lot of any of those, but I did get a good standard British hop. Unremarkable you might say. “Pub beer” is what I say.
Oh dear, I’ve gone over a page already. I‘ve got a couple more beers to tell you about but I think I’ll leave those to another post.
