Brakspear Bitter

In choosing my latest recipe I had two criteria, that it came from my new book "Brew your own Real Ale" by Graham Wheeler, and that it would have a quick turn around. I'm all out of beer at the moment, and those kegs won't fill themselves. I chose to try the Brakspear Bitter recipe from BYORA because I had a good quantity of washed WY1275 Slurry from a previous brew. Also I've been keen to try using some invert sugar in my recipes, based on the experiences of mine host at perfectpint.blogspot.com. Invert is a traditional ingredient in British Ales, and it would appear that it has the dual benefit of adding flavour and decreasing the turn around time for the beer.

The BYORA book lists white sugar as an ingredient where the actual brewery uses invert, in the belief (stated in the introduction) that it adds no flavour to the beer. Several influential brewing bloggers dispute this, and claim that it does indeed add flavour and other characteristics to beer that white sugar can't provide. See http://barclayperkins.blogspot.com.au for lots of information on this.

To make my invert, I took 400ml of tap water to the boil, removed from the heat and slowly mixed in 350g of raw sugar. I also added a heaped tablespoon of glucose to help prevent crystals. To this I added a quarter teaspoon of citric acid and then put the mixture back on the heat. Once it was boiling I waited 20 minutes and then removed it from the heat and allowed it to cool. I ended up with something quite reminiscent of Lyle's Golden syrup, but less viscous.  It certainly has more flavour than a simple white sugar syrup, with some tannic notes.

This is the invert ready to use

I kept things pretty simple equipment wise for this brew, and I've gone back to no-chill just for convenience. As my yeast slurry was getting sort of old, I decided to take around 2.5L of wort into a conical flask to serve as a starter. I also added the finishing hops to this starter since it was going to cool a lot quicker than the bulk of the wort. Hopefully this will preserve most of the finishing hop aroma.

The malt bill is pretty simple, Maris Otter with a little Dark Crystal (all Simpsons malt). I added the invert with the irish moss addition approximately 15 minutes from the end of the boil. My equipment stood up to the job really well, and I think I have a pretty reliable boiler now. I'm toying with the idea of turning my big keg into a double batch BIAB rig using a gas burner. This would mean I could do a single batch on the electric rig and a double batch on the gas, 3 kegs from one brew day - nice! We'll see how that idea develops.

Mash in Progress

My starter was a little slow to take off, about 30 hours, so I'm really glad I decided to use a starter. That has now been pitched to the main batch and things have kicked off with a rocky head appearing after about 12 hours.

Here's the recipe:

3.86kg Simpsons Maris Otter
0.13kg Simpsons Dark Crystal
0.35kg white sugar - I substituted invert as per instructions above

54g Target (I subbed 45g Challenger) at 60mins
11g Styrian Goldings at flameout

"Dry hop with a few cones of Goldings" is the final instruction, whatever that means.