Three beers to talk about today:
BX21 which we called Photon Rabbit v2. It doesn’t share much heritage with v1 but the idea behind it is the same – a light and hoppy beer for Pen to enjoy. So we started with Magnum Blonde then added some rye malt and torrified wheat. After primary fermentation it was dry hopped with equal amount of Wai-iti, Citra, HBC 431 and Nelson Sauvin. Fermented with US05 it gives a easy to drink, cloudy beer of about 4.5% ABV.
We checked and it doesn’t quite class as a NEIPA because we bittered it during the boil. Not that we care as long as Pen enjoys it and she does. She’s a fan of rye, which adds flavour but also body and head, helped by the torrified wheat.
BX22 is another attempt at making a high taste, low ABV stout. It falls into the Foreign Export Stout category. We’ve called it Disaster Area’s Stunt Ship because “The blackness of it was so extreme that it was almost impossible to tell how close you were standing to it.” to quote Douglas Adams about Hot Black Desiato’s space ship.
This attempt is an evolution – more of the speciality malts, replaced the pale crystal with dark and added raisins during the conditioning.
Still a hot mash, this time for 45 mins rather than 60 and a degree higher. The shorter mash would mean less efficiency and less attenuation. The high temperature would push the efficiency up and lower the attenuation more. A more liquid mash should just increase the efficiency.
The final gravity was a heady 1.040. We’ve had other beers *start* lower than that. However, it’s not particularly sweet and has plenty of taste. Water chemisty has stayed the same, with a 3:1 Chloride to Sulphate ratio. Might try upping that even more next time. The speciality malts currently account for about 25% of the grain bill. Next time I want to take that to over 40%. I’m concerned that there won’t be enough diastatic power left but we’ll give it a go anyway.
I would like to try a nice liquid yeast like Wyeast’s Denny’s 50 or London Ale rather than the dry Lallemand London ESB.
Thirdly, we have a kit beer. We always keep a couple in the cellar just in case Pen starts running out of drinkable beers (with 40+ different beers and over 300 bottles that could be difficult but anyway…) so they need using up before they expire. The oldest was too strong so we went for the Mangrove Jack Lemon Sour Gose.
At first we thought we’d have to delay the brewing because we didn’t have the yeast but eventually figured out that the yeast was hidden in a dry pouch alongside the malt. Then we almost gave up because we didn’t have enough dextrose. We’d mistaken malto-dextrin for dextrose and realised that it probably wasn’t a good substitute. We topped up our dextrose with caster sugar and are hoping for the best.