Great British Brew Off–Cheshire Peaks leg

We had a successful brew day yesterday, brewing Whitbread's Porter for the Cheshire Peaks entry in the Great British Brew Off.

We had just one incident, which resulted in us liquoring back (posh name for letting down the wort with water) by far too much. The reason? There were so many hops in the boiler that the hydrometer wasn’t floating, it was balanced on the hops! So initially we read the post-boil gravity as 1.101! We liquored back accordingly, but when we thought about how much water we’d added it just didn’t add up. After checking the gravity properly (using a hydrometer jar) we found that we had dropped the gravity way past the target of 1.060 to 1.051. So what should be 6% ABV will only be 4.8%. Oh well. I hope it does not affect our comparison with Andy Bowers’s brew too much.

Spent grains in the mash tun.

 

Much hot break on the surface of this really dark brew.

 

One must always be impeccably dressed on brew day, don’t you think?

 

Skimmed off hot break scum.

 

LOTS of hops – 113g!

Labelling the Dubbel

We finally got up to date with bottle labelling today. We bottled the Belgian Dubbel a while back, but it has been sat without labels all this time.

Why did it take so long? Well partly laziness, sorry, needing to find time to get round to it. But also partly we kind of struggled with a suitable name and pithy description for the beer.

In the end we settled on “2x” for the name. (It’s a Belgian Dubbel – did you see what we did there?)

And for the pithy description: “A Belgian-style Dubbel, from Cheshire”. Not exactly sparkling with wit, but we also suspect it’s not going to be appearing on our first commercial pump clip anyway…

The Great British Brew Off

Our brewing friend Andy loves traditional (nay, archaic) brewing methods. He mashes for three and a half hours, and mucks about with stepping up the temperature at the end (known as a “mash out”).

I’m not convinced these methods are necessary these days. The modern malting process has been perfected over the ages resulting in “better modified” malts, which means they have a lot more enzymes available to convert the starch to sugar.

So, we wondered, does a three hour mash make any difference to the final beer? Indeed, do any of the other differences in our overall brewing processes make any difference?

And so The Great British Brew Off was born!

Both breweries will work to the same recipe (supplied by Andy, below). Andy will use his three and a half hour mash. Cheshire Peaks will use their standard one hour mash. And at the end we’ll have a hell of a lot of beer to drink!

Here’s the recipe we’re working to:

London Porter (1850) Whitbread's Porter Brewery London OG 1060

per gallon

2.25lbs Pale Malt

7oz Brown Malt

2.5oz Black Malt

1oz fuggles

It’s just like the “technical challenge”. :-)

Colchester’s Bane

We had a very successful brewday yesterday – brewing a dark winter bitter that we plan to call Shutlingsloe.

What’s it made of? Well our usual maris otter pale ale malt, coupled with a decent helping of crystal malt (for sweetness and richness), chocolate malt and Carafa Special I (for that dark rich toasty malty flavour).

And the hops? Well we’re trying something new here: Boudicea hops. These are a less well-known English variety, said to have a light floral character. Andy quipped that we should therefore be calling the beer Colchester’s Bane.

In other news… we also labelled our Norton Priory Abbey Ale. This is a bit of a labour of love because every label has to be shaped by hand. I’ve tried to persuade Andy that we should have a rectangular label like everyone else, but he’s having none of it. Oh well, it gave us something to do whilst the wort chilled.

We’ve made Rodenbach

Credit where credit’s due – Andy’s got a good taste-memory. I said back in my post about infection that Andy had commented that our “Belgian Sour” (as we are now forced to call it) tasted like Rodenbach Classic (Red). Well last night Andy turned up with a bottle of Rodenbach Grand Cru from the Bottle Stop in Bramhall so we could do a side-by-side tasting. (As an side: if you like beer and you live in south Manchester and you haven’t been to the Bottle Stop, then why not!? It has an amazing selection of British and foreign ales).

Anyway, back to the story: the Grand Cru is not exactly the same beer as the Rodenbach Classic, but b*gger me if Andy wasn’t right! Our Belgian Sour is really very similar in aroma and taste. The Grand Cru is understandably more malty and a little bit woody, but the basic elements of the sour flavour are exactly the same.

So I have no idea how we managed to make what we did, but there you go – justification that it isn’t a complete disaster. We both think it will be better served chilled, but we need to finish the Bohemian Wrenbury before there is fridge space.

As another aside (in true Ronnie Corbett style), we also tasted a tricky-to-get American beer called Stone’s Arrogant Bastard. I’ve never tasted such a full on, aggressive beer! It had everything in there – smoke, wood, peat, malt, bitterness, resinous. There were flavours in there I’d just never tasted in beer before. It’s not exactly what you’d call a session beer (in fact I was very happy to have shared a bottle rather than drink a whole one to myself) but interesting nonetheless. I’m not sure we’ll be trying to brew that one however!

Experiences of brewing with rye

We had a successful brew day yesterday, making our Rye Beer Experiment.

We used 30% rye malt and 70% barley malt – from what I’ve read this is a fairly high proportion, but we wanted to get a feel for what it tastes like so risked pushing it.

So what did we learn? Well the first thing I was warned about was getting a stuck mash. This is where the grain in the mash tun becomes to gloopy to allow the sparge water to pass through properly. Rye has much less husk than barley, which means it is prone to becoming a big sticky mess that won’t allow water through it (think porridge). However, despite the warnings our mash/sparge ran completely normally.

Then it comes to the boil. It seems that rye is much higher in protein than barley, and this really showed itself during the boil. Proteins precipitate out during the boil process: an effect known as the hot break. Last night’s hot break was huge -  we had great big clumps of stuff the size of cornflakes floating around in the boil, as you can see below.

Andy skimmed quite a lot of the scum off the boil too, as you can see below.

Finally, getting the wort out of the boiler into the fermenter was something of a challenge. My new boiler has a filter at the bottom, as shown below.

I don’t have a photo of it, but the filter mesh was utterly clogged up with break material (the precipitated proteins). I had to sanitise a little brush and scrub at the mesh to help the wort to get through. (Sorry, no photo of that – too busy with it!).

So all in all, it doesn’t bode well for a clear beer. Those proteins are bound to leave a lot of haze. But hopefully it will be an interesting (and tasty!) beer nonetheless.

Rye Beer Experiment

You can make beer out of all sorts of grains. Obviously the most common is barley. Wheat is also a common addition to beer. But many other grains can be used too: rye, spelt, oats, rice, sorghum, millet.

So I thought we’d better try some to see what they taste like. The most obvious one after wheat is rye. My interest in rye was piqued following a conversation with Toby at Red Willow on Twitter, where he said that he uses rye in his excellent Sleepless American Amber Ale.

So that’s the recipe for Monday’s brewday: a rye experiment. It will be a fairly standard bitter in most respects, except that 30% of the pale ale malt will be replace with rye malt. (This is fairly brave – most people seem to recommend about 20% maximum, but we want to really get a sense of what it tastes like).

So what are we expecting it to taste like? I understand that rye gives the beer an interesting grainy, slightly spicy flavour with a dry mouthfeel. I guess we’ll just have to wait and see.