Six Month Catch Up (Part 2)

Last time I posted I was trying to catch up with the brews we’ve made since my last blog posts. Without further ado…

Gyle 83 Vanilla Oak Unusual

We have a recipe that we call Audlem Unusual, which is very similar to Old Peculier – a particularly favourite beer. We usually brew this beer to be ready for Christmas. So we did this brew on 12th October and it fact we still have a little left in the barrel and it is drinking very well.
But this year we wanted to put a little twist on it, so we added oak chips and two vanilla pods. It was a subtle addition, but I think it was very nice for a change.
We used 30g of medium toast french oak chips, which were added to 200ml of boiling water (to give them a little sanitation). This was then cooled and added to the beer 4 days into fermentation. The vanilla pods were split and the seeds removed, then the seeds and pods were added to the fermenter at the same time.

Gyle 84 Milk Stout

Milk Stout is an unusual beer style because it is sweetened with milk sugar (lactose). This gives it a sweet flavour to complement the dark, rich full-roasted flavours of the stout. Lovely!
So why is milk sugar added, rather than ordinary sugar? Well ordinary sugar is fermentable by yeast, so will just give you a stronger dry beer. Lactose is not fermentable so you can rely on it staying in the beer to give sweetness.
As with many of our beers, I used the recipe from Brewing Classic Styles by Jamil Zainasheff and John Palmer. I have had such success with the recipes in this book. There’s only one recipe per style, but that still gives you 80 recipes to try and every one I have done has come out extremely well. The recipes are formulated for brewing with malt extract, but for every one there’s an all-grain option with is easy enough to use to convert the recipe. If you make all-grain beer (or extract) you should have a copy of this book.
Oh, and of course the milk stout came out great too. It was another one we brewed for Christmas, so that and the Vanilla Oak Unusual gave plenty of dark ale variety.

Gyle 85 Export India Porter

This was such a great brew I think it warrants a post all of its own (and probably the recipe too). Watch this space…