Boddingtons Second Brew

As I said in the last post, we’re trying to recreate Boddingtons – the classic cask Boddies from the Strangeways brewery.

Last week we brewed a recipe from Orfy on Jim’s Beer Kit Forum. This week we brewed Seymour’s recipe which, interestingly, is completely different. It’s a much simpler malt bill and a much more complex set of hops.

We used the same yeast that we used for the first brew (WYeast 1318 London Ale III). The great thing about doing brews back-to-back is you can just re-use the yeast cake from the last brew. So we simply racked the first brew into a keg and then pitched the new brew straight onto the yeast in the same fermenter. This works a treat and it saves you a whole load of washing and sanitising of the fermenter into the bargain. (In fact we’ve got plans for a third brew on this yeast cake, but more on that in a future post).

So for the record, here’s the recipe for Boddingtons 2 (Seymour recipe).

Thanks to both Orfy and Seymour! :-)

Grain bill

Maris Otter    3400g (95%)

Black Patent  70g (2%)

Cane sugar    110g (3%)

Hop Schedule

Fuggles               (5% AA) 24g  60min  (11 IBU)

EKG                     (5.4% AA) 17g  60min  (9 IBU)

WGV                    (6% AA)  16g  60min  (10 IBU)

Northern Brewer  (8.4% AA) 2g  60min  (2 IBU)

WGV                    (6% AA)  15g  flameout

EKG                     (5.4% AA) 10g  flameout

Northern Brewer  (8.4% AA) 10g  flameout

Water treatment: In 32 litres, 2.5 tsp gypsum and 1 tsp CaCl

Yeast: WYeast 1318 London Ale III  (yeast cake from previous brew)

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: 1.036

IBU: 32

Colour: 11 Lovibond, 14 SRM, 28 EBC

Target FG: 1.010

Target ABV: 3.5%

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.

Rushton Imperial Stout–bottling

We bottled the Rushton Imperial Stout this evening. (Follow that link to read about when we brewed it.)

This is such a strong beer we only got 1 gallon of it, which when bottled made only 17 330ml bottles!
I was disappointed how high the final gravity was – 1.064. This is way above what I’d been aiming for, and has resulted in a very sweet, think beer with a strength of only (!) 8.8%. We’d been gunning for 12%! Why? Well we had a high mash temperature, which must have resulted in a LOT of complex non-fermentable sugars. Maybe another time we’ll dial down the mash temp a bit. You live and learn.

However (and this is the big however), we’re actually dead pleased with the final beer. It’s going to be a hugely rich and tasty beer which is what we were aiming for. Here’s a few tasting notes:

Appearance – jet black, with thick crude oil-like viscosity.

Aroma – camp coffee.

Taste – Dark bitter chocolate. Firm but not unpleasant bitterness that stays in the mouth for many minutes. Perhaps some slight acidity. Warmth from the alcohol, but not fumy.

Mouthfeel – thick and silky, coats the mouth.

These are going to stay in bottle for about a year before they are ready to drink.

Rushton Imperial Stout #2

Back in May we made a Russian Imperial Stout. Or at least we tried to. But it didn’t really turn out the way we planned due to over-sparging (that is, we put in too much extra water). This resulted in a much weaker brew that we’d planned – 6.5 % instead of 8.5%. (Although it was still delicious!)

So last week we tried again, this time with more careful planning and higher goals still.

A Russian Imperial Stout can be up to 10% ABV or more. If you want to achieve a beer as strong as this you can’t really add ANY water to the mash. The problem is this is rather wasteful of the remaining sugars in the grains – if you don’t add water (sparge) to wash these out then they are wasted.

Enter parti-gyle brewing. This is the name given to the technique of making more than one beer from a single mash. You make your strong beer from the first runnings from the mash tun, then add more water and make a second beer with the second runnings.

This turned out to be easier and less time-consuming than we expected. We did the mash, then ran all the wort out of the mash tun, leaving dry grains. We boiled this as our first beer. Meanwhile, we refilled the mash tun with hot water and after a few minutes ran this off (adding some additional water through normal sparging).

What did that leave us with? Well the first beer reduced down a long way during the boil and we were left with only about 1 gallon of wort. But what a wort – it had a gravity of 1.130! This is hopefully going to give us a beer of about 12% if we can get it to ferment out that far.

The second beer came out at about 1.061. That should give us a respectable 5.5% beer, which we flavoured with addition of a vanilla pod towards the end of the boil. (Mmmm, vanilla stout…)

We had the yeast cake from a recent brew of Audlem Unusual (our Old Peculier clone), so we split that into two which will have provided plenty of yeast for the fermentation. The first beer went absolutely crackers during the first 24 hours, but then calmed down just as fast. So a few days later I added some champagne yeast which has a greater tolerance for high levels of alcohol. Hopefully that will help ferment the beer out further.

This evening I have moved both beers onto our under floor heating to warm them up a bit and encourage them to finish off.

9kg of malt

 

Very full mash tun!

 

First runnings

 

Refilling the mash with hot water

 

Getting the big beer out of the hops after the boil required a bit of squeezing.

 

Proof – 1.130

 

The big beer is on the left – barely 1 gallon

Racking the damson porter

We racked the damson porter today, which was a hell of a mess. If you remember, we made a porter and added 2.5kg of damsons to the fermenter. These were a deep thick mush in the bottom of the fermenter, which made getting the beer down the pipe somewhat tricky. In the end we had to resort to using a sanitised stainless steel fork to jab the damsons out of the way.

The beer is now in a separate fermenter and we’ve added finings to get it clear. We’ll bottle it next week.

Damson Porter

Andy has a walk that he does at this time every year near Tarporley in Cheshire. He does it partly because of the abundance of damsons and sloes in the hedgerows in late September. This year he picked 3.5kg of damsons and we have used them to make a damson porter.

We brewed it last week, and the base porter recipe was as follows:

Grain Bill

• 4.31kg maris otter pale ale malt
• 450g brown malt
• 450g crystal malt (45L)
• 280g chocolate malt

Hops

• 32g progress, 60 mins (15 IBU)
• 20g bramling cross, 60 mins (10 IBU)
• 14g fuggles, 10 mins (1 IBU)

Mash 67C for 60 mins

OG 1.053

We used the yeast cake from the previous brew (Stock Old Horizontal clone), which was Safale US-05.

With such a rich yeast cake, fermentation was extremely vigorous for the first couple of days. I was glad of temperature control so I could cool it to 16C to keep it under control. Still had a bit of a mess though!

After 3 days we added the damsons. These had been initially prepared as follows:

• The best 2.5kg were selected – the softest, ripest and least damaged
• These were washed and frozen, the idea being that the freezing process would kill wild yeast
• On the day they were added, we defrosted them and placed them in a stainless steel bowl
• We poured boiling water over them and left it for five minutes, in an attempt to kill some of the bacteria on them
• The water was drained and the damsons mashed with a sanitised potato masher
• The mashed damsons were added directly to the FV and stirred in with a sanitised brew spoon

After the fruit was added, the FV was held at 16C for a few days then gradually ramped up to 19C. The vigorous initial fermentation again made a mess, this time with bits of damson skin getting stuck in the airlock. It’s a good job I caught this because the gas was not getting out at all and the lid was ballooning!

I plan to leave it for at least another week, then rack to another FV and fine it. Then it will be primed and bottled and matured for at least a few months.