new year, new beer. happy brew year? starting the year off with a big strong beer sounds like a good idea. what's that you say, another historic beer? surely you tire of this, but i do brew other things (and lots of them, so maybe i'll post about them too). but i do find these beers to be rather interesting and since they are not made commercially on a regular basis what better to do than re-brew some history. i've been reading Ron Pattinson's excellent blog
"shut up about barclay perkins " for some time, and it regularly features homebrewed versions of beers from old brewing logs. some look better than others, but this recipe was just too crazy to resist.
mild ale. today that 'style' means weak, dark, no hops, and 'sessionable' as per 'tradition'. of course in the old days, attaching the word mild to an ale or beer meant it had not been aged very long at the brewery (a few weeks maybe, as opposed to pale ales which could be aged for a year or more) before being released to a publican. well i'm not going to continue on with the history, so on to the brew.
here's the ingredients used:
20 lbs. Munton's Mild Malt
4.5 oz UK Kent Goldings, 5.8AA%, pellets
WLP007 Dry English Ale yeast
not complicated. no sugars to thin the body. keep in mind, this is for a 5 gallon batch, not a 10 gallon like i usually do. the yeast i'm using is not what is called for, but i like this yeast's ability to dry out a beer and it is rather alcohol tolerant. the original recipe and details are
here
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| 20 lbs. of cracked mild malt |
so using the brew equipment that i've shown before (and become too lazy to take pictures of again and again since it really hasn't changed much) i heated plenty of strike water to 170F and doughed-in the mild malt to close to what was ordered (151F)
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| my bbq probe at work in the mash., but missed again. no beef in there! |
after a nice one hour of conversion (which smelled really, really nice) i mashed out. no steeping hops for this one, so the fly sparge was done like regular.
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| i like the pumps. well, unless the ball valves get clogged. which frequently happens. |
sweet runnings were collected until there was approximately 12 gallons
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| runnings directed to the boil kettle |
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| sparging the mash with hot water |
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| ~12 gallons in the boil kettle |
now on to the scary and ugly part, the boil. normally boiling is just part of the job, and 90 minutes isn't too much of a problem. this one called for a 4 hour boil. 240 minutes. half of a work day! so to keep occupied (and avoid getting stupid drunk while waiting) i figured i'd take a pre-boil gravity.
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| looks like 1.053 @ 70F to me. note the nice pale color. |
so the boil started.
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| start of the boil with hops in a muslin bag |
and went on and on. my friend and fellow brewer dave stopped by, so we had a few beers while sitting around watching a pot boil. it then occurred that not enough boiling off had taken place, as the volume was not low enough after 4 hours of fun.
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| damn, boil harder! |
so the heat was cranked up and the boil was much harder and continued for another hour. 15 minutes before knock out, whirlfloc was added to aid with clarification. after a 10 minute whirlpool the sweet wort was chilled through the therminator with out incident unlike previous times. after chilling the batch completely, it appeared i boiled more furiously than i realized, as i collected ~4.5 gallons of wort. better to get the gravity than not.
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| i'm calling this 1.118 @ 65F. caramelized in the kettle, and loads of break material ! |
after primary fermentation, the resulting ale will be dry hopped with UK Kent Golding hops (big surprise right). more information as it comes...
