No one liked it.
Latest brewing exploits
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.
Stockport Homebrew Competition
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.
Extract Challenge update
The final beer was pretty close to what we’d intended. Mike used his new priming sugar calculator to prime it in a half-filled corny keg. It might still need some time to ferment out though as the reports from drinkers were that it was a bit sweet.
We took it to the home brew group along with everyone else’s attempt. Rich was co-opting people’s APAs (both extract and all grain) into his presentation about Beer Judging. Our was blindly evaluated along with the others and came out last. This was a bit of a surprise because Pen actually quite likes this version. The previous time we did this kit was for the five way split and she refuses to drink those batches.
Session beer for Pen
Since we got the corny kegs we realised that having a session beer under the stairs, where it’s quite cool, is quite a good idea. It also means that we don’t need to bottle, which is Pen’s least favourite part of the brewing process.
However, we need a suitable beer: nothing too alcoholic nor too strong in flavour, just something simple and drinkable. The initial plan is to make a variant of the Magnum Blonde, something like our Special RealAletionship but a bit different. Maybe a different yeast with a variety of flavourful hops to turn it into something like an American IPA.