Month: December 2019

The next two beers will be brewed just before Christmas. The plan is to spend the weekend of the 21st brewing a bitter and a lager. Yes, a lager. Our first. We don’t have temperature control so the plan is to ferment in the cellar at about 10-14C and then we’re hoping for a cold winter and might leave it outside on cold days/nights to cold crash. We’ll have to see.

The bitter is another attempt at Coniston Bluebird. Hopefully this time it’ll brew without an infection. It was quite tasty last time and we were quite annoyed to have to tip it all down the drain.

For our first full grain since the infection we decided to try out our simplest recipe. Special RealAletionship consists of just Maris Otter, Magnum for the bittering, S-04 and a choice of hop for aroma/flavour.

Any off flavours should be quite apparent in the base beer. If this works without issue then we’ll move on to something more complex. We didn’t want to waste a load of expensive grain if the infection was still there.

The aroma hop we picked was GP75 from Stock’s Farm. We’ve not used it before so it’s bit of a wildcard. Pen sniffed the open pack and she liked it so we’re hoping for the best.

We brewed it over a week ago and now it’s just sat in a coldish room with the hops slowly imparting their oils.

We’re going to keg most of it next weekend and force carbonate. The rest will be bottled, some for long term testing and some for the Home Brew Club.

The kit’s now been bottled – 4 x 330ml and 4 x 500ml of each split. No infection and lots of fruity smells. Pen still thinks that the base beer is pretty poor but we’ll leave it a while to see if it improves, like the previous one did.