We’re stout, and we’re proud!

On Tuesday we brewed “Mow Cop Stout” – a stout to our own recipe formulation. If you’ve been reading this blog regularly (is anyone actually DOING that??), you’ll have noticed that we have been brewing a great deal of dark beers recently. This is probably the last in that line: we’re starting to think about slightly lighter beers for drinking in the new year. But for now, dark, dark, dark.

And boy will this one be dark! I’ve never seen such thick black wort running out of the mash tun. One of the most common ingredients in stouts is roasted barley. This has a very dark brown colour and imparts a burnt, coffee-like flavour and a dry graininess. A bit like a rather well known stout. We’ve added plenty of chocolate malt too, which will hopefully make it a slightly sweeter, richer beer than its well-known cousin.

One last boring beer-making observation on our brew day: we completely forgot to add any minerals to our water! Usually we would add gypsum (calcium sulphate), calcium chloride, magnesium sulphate and common salt (sodium chloride) in varying quantities in order to emulate the mineral content of the area from which our target beer style comes from. This helps to adjust the mash acidity (so it mashes correctly) and also assists in enhancing flavour. Generally speaking, chlorides will enhance maltiness (think adding salt to food as a flavour enhancer) and sulphates will enhance the bitterness. So in theory you should be able to adjust minerals to compliment your style… only this time we were in such a rush to “mash in” we completely forgot the minerals! So, we’re treating it as an experiment… can we notice any difference? Time will tell. Many brewers don’t bother with water treatment anyway, so whatever happens we hope we’ll get something drinkable!

One last thing – in case you don’t know, Mow Cop is a lump of rock that sticks up out of Cheshire south of Congleton. On the top is Mow Cop Castle, a folly built in 1754 by the owner of a local hall (Rode Hall) as a summerhouse and to give an interesting thing to look at on the horizon from his house.

PS This time I managed to use my obscure Not The Nine O'clock News quote for the blog post title! See this post for why that matters!

Axe Edge

I’d got it all worked out. We were supposed to be making Mow Cop Stout today. We’d designed the recipe, bought the ingredients, chosen the name and I’d even thought of a witty title for my next blog post (“We’re stout, and we’re proud!”)

Then Andy turned up brandishing a 1989 copy of Roger Protz’s Beer Almanac and waving the Owd Rodger page at me. We’ve been looking for a recipe for Marston’s Owd Rodger on the Internet for a while and had surprisingly little success. I don’t know why – there seem to be recipes for many many other well known beers out there. But not this one. And then Andy found the loosest suggestion of a recipe on Protz’s book: 73% pale ale malt, 10% crystal malt, 17% glucose; fuggles, goldings and “worcester” goldings hops.

So we quickly expanded that into a recipe we were happy with and luckily we had all the necessary ingredients. We got brewing.

For those that don’t know, Owd Rodger is a shockingly strong “old ale”. The original gravity is 1.080, which makes it about 7.6% ABV. Not to be taken lightly. In the old days we used to refer to it as the four horsemen of the apocalypse (because the fourth pint was death).

Anyway, today’s brew day went well, and we even came up with a suitably “dangerous” sounding name: Axe Edge. (And it’s even a Cheshire Peak too!)

Building up stocks for Christmas

It takes at least four weeks from brew day for a beer to be ready to drink, so November has been a busy time building up stocks for Christmas.

We started last Monday with Audlem Unusual, which is based on a well known “aged and strange” ale from Yorkshire. This is the third time we have brewed this beer, and we have not changed the recipe much from last time. It strong (about 5.5%), dark and malty. This time we have fermented it with Safale S-04 dry yeast, so we hope for a quick fermentation leaving a very clear beer. In a previous post I talked about the BJCP style Guidelines: technically this is categorised as an “old ale” by our American cousins, although I have never heard a British person use the term.

After that, we are planning to brew our first stout. This will be the first time that we have completely formulated our own recipe from scratch. Obviously we looked at a load of stout recipes and considered the ingredients that are generally used. The most significant of these is roasted barley. This is unmalted barley that has been roasted until black. It gives rich chocolate and coffee undertones to a beer, as well as an extremely dark colour.

The working name for this will be Mow Cop Stout – yes, we’ve actually got the name of a Cheshire Peak in there! In fact we have also planned out a number of other beer names we plan to use (along with the style they will be), but in an annoyingly tantalising twist… that will have to wait for another post! :-)

In other news: we bottled the weizenbock last Friday. Bottling is a tedious process compared to putting the beer in a barrel, but it does have a few advantages. Firstly, I am hoping we’ll get a higher level of carbonation in the beer (which we think is important to the style: the dunkelweizen from the barrel was just a little too much like a flat British ale). Secondly, it gives you a whole load more flexibility in terms of being able to store it for longer and drink it over a longer period without tying up a barrel and worrying about it going off. The bottles are currently conditioning in the house before they go into cooler storage in the garage.

Mash Tun

The brewing process has about four major stages:

• Mix the malted grain with hot water and hold it at about 66^oC for about an hour – this allows the enzymes in the malt to convert the starches to fermentable sugars and is called mashing;
• Run the liquid off the “mash”, and run through more hot water to wash out all the remaining sugars. This is called sparging;
• Boil the “wort” with hops for an hour or so. This sterilises the wort, extracts bitterness from the hops and can develop some rich toasted flavours (the maillard reaction, as in cooking);
• Chill the wort, add yeast and ferment.

To perform the first step you need a “mash tun”, which is an insulated vessel in which you can hold the grain and water whilst the reactions take place, and which has a filter at the bottom so you can run off the liquid and leave the grain undisturbed – you don’t want to get particles from the grain into the beer because it will affect clarity.

The filter at the bottom of the mash tun is the tricky bit for home brewers – it’s not really a piece of equipment that you have hanging around in the kitchen. So before Andy and I could start all-grain brewing we had to make one.

You can buy fancy stainless steel mash tuns if you like, but a popular cheap option is to make (or buy) one from a cool box. I picked up the cheapest cool box I could (£12 from Tesco) and we set about attacking it with a drill.

As you can see, we drilled through the inner and outer plastic and fitted a plastic tap which we then sealed with food grade silicone sealant.

Then we took a regular piece of copper pipe and some corner and T-pieces:

We sawed slits in each piece of pipe to allow liquid to drain through. This fits together like this:

This then fits inside the cool box with the slits downwards:

That’s it really. We left all the pieces of pipe un-soldered to make them easier to take apart and wash. Also solder contains lead which we didn’t really want in our mash very much.

On brew day we fill the mash tun with the “strike water” – at about 75^oC. We let this sit and warm the mash tun until it is down to about 72^oC when we “mash in” – mix in the grain.

After a quick stir and check of the temperature (which should now be 66^oC to 68^oC depending on our recipe) we put on the lid, wrap it all in a special high tech lagging device (sleeping bag) and leave it for an hour.

After the hour we start running off the wort:

And then “sparging” (gently pouring hot water onto the top of the grain bed) using another very high tech device from the diary industry:

And there you have it – five gallons of wort ready for boiling:

Weizenbock

Regular readers will know that we recently brewed a dark Bavarian wheat beer (a dunkelweizen), which we are currently still drinking and seems to be getting thicker and bananaier (is that a word?) by the day.

This was pretty successful and we skimmed some of the wheat ale yeast off during the fermentation. It seems a bit of a shame not to use that yeast before it goes off, so we looked into what other wheat beers we could brew. The obvious choice was a Weizen/Weissbier, but this is more a lighter summer drink. The other option was a weizenbock, which combines the dark flavours of a dunkelweizen with the rich strength and body of a German bock (a strong rich malty lager from Munich).

So that’s what we’re brewing on Friday. I picked up the wheat malt that the recipe requires from a homebrew shop today that I had not been to before. Slightly bizarre experience – the lad in there obviously didn’t know what malt is made from because when I asked for wheat malt he tried to sell me spray malt (which is dried malt extract). I said “no, wheat malt”. To which he said all malt is made from wheat (sigh, I reminded him that most malt is made from barley). But eventually he realised I wanted grain, and took me into the back which turned out to be a small brewery. The brewing gods had obviously smiled on me because there sat a sack labelled “Thomas Fawcett Wheat Malt”. Five minutes later I was off down the road with two bags containing totally un-weighed wheat malt scooped directly from the Fawcett’s sack. I assume I’ve got enough, but we’ll have to see on Friday!

Why does it have to be so clear?

We tasted the Dunkelweizen this week and we’re delighted with it. It has a deep rich complex malty flavour, and yes, those banana and clove flavours are noticeable (especially the banana, which Ian had a bit of trouble with!). In fact I’d go so far as to say it is pretty similar to the Erdinger Dunkel that originally inspired us.

If I’m being picky, there are a few “observations”:

• It needed to be colder (we can fix that)
• It needed more carbonation (we can fix that too)
• Andy’s observation: “Why does it have to be so clear?”

On the latter one, we’ve been on a “quest for clarity” for a while now: many of our recent ales have been disappointingly hazy. As soon as we make a brew that is supposed to be hazy, it comes out clearer than our ales. Which does make me think our yeast might be the cause. We’ve used different yeast (Safale S04) in the Knutsford Brown Ale. It’ll be interesting to see if there’s any difference.

Knutsford Brown Ale

Andy and I both (separately) encountered Burton Bridge Brewery’s Staffordshire Knot Brown Ale recently, and it reminded us how much we like this little-loved British style. The Burton Bridge example was delicious – rich, sweet, fruity and smooth. Everything you want to warm you on these shorter days.

So we set about planning our own version. Initially I looked at Jamil Zainasheff’s recipes in Brewing Classic Styles. It’s interesting how our American Cousins like to categorise things. They have an organisation called the Beer Judge Certification Program (BJCP), who seem to exist to categorise and sub-categorise beer. I thought brown ale was brown ale, but apparently there is Southern English Brown Ale and Northern English Brown Ale! The main difference is that Southern Browns have lower alcohol content and are significantly darker than Northern Browns. There are very few commercial examples of Southern Browns left – the only one I can find mention of is Mann’s Brown Ale. There are a fair few Northern Browns of course, such as Samuel Smith’s Nut Brown Ale, Newcastle Brown Ale and Wychwood Hobgoblin (although that last one surprised me). Incidentally the BJCP also classify Mild as a sub-category of Brown Ale.

Anyway, taxonomies apart, what are we going to brew? Well I toyed with the idea of brewing something close to Jamil’s Southern English Brown recipe, but annoyingly (maybe ironically) you can’t get all the malts needed for that recipe in the UK! In particular it uses a malt called “special roast”, which I cannot find in the UK – it seems to be made by one particular US maltster.

Then I found the basics of a recipe for the Burton Bridge Staffordshire Knot Brown Ale. It wasn’t all there, but there was enough to build our own version. And that’s what Andy and I brewed last night. We have high hopes that this will be a rich, malty and warming winter ale, and one that we can brew again and again.

Like the name, by the way?