After the success of the Beamish clone, I decided to do another recipe from Will at
http://perfectpint.blogspot.com . This time it's his "Session Bitter". I had to make some changes based on hops and yeast available to me, and my lack of a mill. Will recommends toasting some Maris Otter for this brew, but this needs to be done before crushing. My local homebrew shop puts together my malt bills for me and I pick them up freshly crushed at the shop. This time around I substituted Briess Victory for the toasted MO.
I stuck with East Kent Goldings for finishing hops, but substituted Northdown for the Challenger. For yeast I chose Wyeast 1275 "Thames Valley Ale". This is supposedly the Brakespear strain, and is a pretty strong attenuator for an English Ale yeast. To be honest this was chosen in a bit of a rush when another yeast I was thinking of using was out of stock. It will be interesting to see how it turns out.
I still haven't quite figured out a 'house' yeast for English style bitters and lower alcohol 'session' beers. I use WY1469 (west yorkshire) and WY1968 (London ESB) quite a lot, and generally have vials or slurry on hand. While they both produce fantastic beer, the tend to not attenuate the beer as much as I would like. This is not a problem for me with bigger beers which I will only have one or two pints of in a night, but for 'session' beers I want a low FG, from about 1.008 to 1.010. I could get this with 1469 and 1968 if I was to add some simple sugars, but I'm keen to avoid this if I can - I would just prefer to stick to all malt beers.
I had a porter fermented with WY1469 recently which ended up at 1.016, and while it was a tasty drop at first, two pints in I had enough - which is unusual for me!
I've tried lowering the mash temperature, and this is something I will look at again when I get a proper recirculating mash system in operation, but have not had success. I want there to be a yeast character in my bitters, so american ale yeast is not an option, though it will generally give 75% or more apparent attenuation in my experience. Hopefully the Thames Valley yeast may provide a solution, time will tell.
Anyway, here's the particulars for the session bitter as brewed by me:
Recipe Specifics
----------------
Batch Size (L): 22.60 Wort Size (L): 22.60
Total Grain (kg): 4.00
Anticipated OG: 1.042 Plato: 10.38
Anticipated EBC: 23.4
Anticipated IBU: 29.4
Brewhouse Efficiency: 75 %
Wort Boil Time: 60 Minutes
Grain/Extract/Sugar
% Amount Name Origin Potential EBC
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
4.5 0.18 kg. Victory Malt USA 1.034 73
89.1 3.56 kg. Pale Malt (Maris Otter) UK 1.038 8
3.8 0.15 kg. Crystal 60L UK 1.035 158
2.6 0.10 kg. Crystal 120L UK 1.033 317
Hops
Amount Name Form Alpha IBU Boil Time
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
20.00 g. Northdown Pellet 9.60 26.0 45 min.
16.00 g. East Kent Goldings Pellet 5.45 3.3 0 min.
30.00 g. East Kent Goldings Pellet 4.75 0.0 Pre-ferment
16.00 g. East Kent Goldings Pellet 4.75 0.0 Dry Hop
Yeast
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Wyeast 1275 (Thames Valley Ale)
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| Cubed Wort, 1L starter, 2.5L late hopping experiment |
I've mentioned before that I 'no-chill' my beers. This involves transferring the still almost boiling wort into a clean sealed container (cube), and leaving this to cool in it's own time. It sounds barbaric, but has it's advantages. Firstly there's a big time saving, a good hour or two is knocked off the brew day. It separates out the brewing and fermenting stages of the day, which means that fermentation gets the attention it deserves, and is not just an afterthought at the end of a long session over the pot. You can draw off a litre or two and make a starter with the actual wort you are brewing with. There's no chiller to clean (or even buy), and no water used for chilling, which has been an issue here in Melbourne where water has been scarce in the recent past.
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| Boiling 2.5 litres of wort with 30g of EKGs |
Of course no-chilling also has it's disadvantages, and the only one that constantly disappoints me is the lack of late hop character. It's something I look for in all of my beers, and is the reason that I'm about to set up a chilling system of my own. I'm keen to try out extreme late-hopping (see Jamil Zainasheff's article on it
here), and I know that no-chilling will not work for this. However for english style bitters and ales, the late hop character is far more subtle, and I'm hoping that a technique I read about on
http://www.aussiehomebrewer.com/ might work for me. The idea is to draw off a small portion of the wort after cooling but just before fermenting, bring it to the boil, add the late hops, and then add it back to the remaining wort. This will cause it to cool rapidly, and should lock in some of the more volatile hop character. I'm going to give it a try for this brew, and we'll see how it works. I decided to draw off 2.5L from the kettle into a large conical flask I have before filling the cube itself. This evening (1 day after brew day), I boiled this up for 5 mins, then threw in what would normally be the 0min hop addition. I allowed this to boil for 1min, then let it sit for 10 mins and then emptied it into the cube on top of the 17L or so of wort already in there. I added my 1L starter of yeast, aerated (shaking), and now it's up to the yeasties to do their thing. It's currently sitting at 19C in my fermenting fridge.
