We entered two beers, a Mild and a Stout. The Mild was a heavily modified version of the Darkheart Mild. Our first attempt at Darkheart was to clone it as closely as possible and the results came out well (BX17). Pen liked it. However, the second attempt saw changes to the malt bill (added Amber), the yeast (London ESB) and the hops (BX19). It wasn’t as good. A bit thin. So it wasn’t surprising that we finished pretty much last in the Mild category.
The Stout did a bit bitter. Again the basis of this was a recipe from someone whose beer Pen really liked: Aaron. His Imperial Stout really impressed her (and pretty much everyone else) so we tried brewing this, again, as closely as possible (BX18). Not sure how close it was to Aaron’s but both he and Pen liked it. However, Mike didn’t quite get the late addition hops scaled right so Pen though it was too hoppy for the style. No one else at the Home Brew Group agreed though.
So the next step was to scale the recipe for Stockport’s competition. At 10% Aaron’s was much higher than the upper limit. BX18 came out lower because of a higher final volume than intended but was still too high at 7+%. The upper limit for Stockport was 6.5% so we wanted to ensure that the second attempt came in at a sensible strength.
A conversation with Paul from Beatnikz about his excellent stout led us down an interesting path. He mashes at a very high temperature so that they can have lots of malt but keep the strength low. Also he uses water chemistry to shift the taste towards the malty side.
So, that’s what we did and it worked quite well (BX20). We’d aimed for about 6% and got 5.3%. The OG was about right but the FG was even higher than anticipated. We think that there must be even less fermentables in the grain bill than our calculator said. That’s fine though, we don’t mind a lower strength as long as it tastes good. And it does. Pen prefers it to BX18. And this showed. We came third (out of 17) at Stockport!
Mike is now happy – after the poor showing of the Mild and the extract brew he was determined that a milestone should be top three in a category at Stockport and now that goal has been fulfilled. Next milestone ought to be a win in a category there.