Brewer's Gold

Wow, it's been quite a delay between my last post and this one. I've moved house, which means that I now have a garage, and hence somewhere to brew indoors so I'm not so vulnerable to the weather and lack of daylight. Also I can have the brewery set up permanently, which saves me an hour or so of assembly and disassembly every brew day. Unfortunately the move led to a long hiatus in my brewing, and I've had no beer on tap for nearly three months now - far too long!!

The Beginnings of a Permanent Installation

I've got a few brews lined up, but this is the first: a clone of Crouch Vale Brewer's Gold. I was actually at 'The Great British Beer Festival" one year when the original won champion beer, and a fine drop it was too.

The plan is to do a no-chill, with a huge dose of brewer's gold hops just before flame out. This should provide a good deal of bitterness and hop aroma/flavour, while a very small charge at the start of the boil will keep things under control and add some IBUs.

This is really a summer brew, but I've had the hops on hand since April and have been planning to have a go at it since long before then. It's a chance to get to know another hop variety, and should be an easy drinking ale on the handpump in a short period of time.

I'd like to be drinking this in three weeks, so I'll be taking a large starter to innoculate with WLP006, and I'll get the fermentation happening within a few days.

Here's the recipe:

 Grain/Extract/Sugar

   %     Amount     Name                          Origin        Potential SRM
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
 100.0     3.91 kg.  Lager Malt(2-row)             UK             1.037      1

Potential represented as SG per pound per gallon.


Hops

   Amount     Name                              Form    Alpha  IBU  Boil Time
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
  5.00 g.     Brewer's Gold                     Pellet   7.00   5.1  60 min.
 95.00 g.     Brewer's Gold                     Pellet   7.00  25.9  15 min.


Yeast
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WLP006

A Special Bitter

My first brew of 2013 proved to be a disaster, with my element blowing at the first hop addition. The situation was rescued (again), by ripping off the insulation and bringing the pot inside onto our cook top, which luckily has a high powered gas ring.

This is the third time I've blown one of these elements, and I'm done with them. I'll be purchasing a gas burner as soon as I can get my hands on one. I'm finding it harder and harder to find the time to brew, so anything which interrupts a brew session really hurts.

Anyway, the recipe is a new one, though familiar looking in some ways. It's a special bitter from perfectpint.blogspot.com . Apart from a sub of Willamette for Fuggles, my recipe is identical, yeast included. To get the hard water profile required I needed 2.5tsp gypsum, 1tsp Epsom salts and 0.75tsp Calcium chloride.

I had planned to chill this one on the plate chiller, but having to bring the pot inside was quite enough lugging around for one day, so I didn't lug it back out to do the chilling, I just no-chilled in a cube after the 15 minute hop addition (which became a flame out addition). I saved 2L of wort in an Erlenmyer flask and when pitching the yeast 2 days later (a 1L starter of WLP006), I boiled this 2L, turned off the flame and steeped the Styrians in it for 10 minutes before adding it to the main batch. This is a method from AussieHomeBrewer that I've tried before with limited success, but I was a bit stuck for ideas on Saturday so I'm trying again.

With the decision to change to gas comes another decision - do I double up on batch volume? I haven't decided yet about this. I'm usually quite sorry to see the end of a batch, and there are a lot of people about who drink my beer (I actually didn't get to taste a recent batch it disappeared so quickly). At the moment I'm inclined to do it, but that could change.