International Homebrew Project recap

A bit behind schedule, but finished nonetheless. The beer brewed for the International Homebrew Project was voted on, brewed, bottled and now it has also been drunk. I can say it was one of the most interesting recipes I have ever brewed. My version of the brew was a 2.5 gallon batch that turned out having a higher original gravity and a higher final gravity than any of the other brewers. I only got about 60% attenuation which I can only explain by assuming that the invert sugar ended up being mostly unfermentable. My version ended up looking like this:

OG: 1.060
FG: 1.036
IBU 40
abv: 3.2%

2.5 lbs Warminster Maris Otter  51%
0.375 lbs Simpson's Dark Crystal 8%
0.5 lbs Amber malt 10%
0.375 lbs Brown malt  8%
0.375 lbs Roasted barley  8%
0.5 lbs lactose  10%
0.25 invert sugar  5%
0.5 ounces fuggle @ 120 min
0.4 ounces kent golding (super kent at 7.2% AA) @ 90 min
Wyeast 1318 London III
~0.5 lbs lactose in priming solution

Upon tasting, it has an extremely powerful flavor for a beer of 3.2%. There is so much lactose, and the final gravity is so high, that it's just very thick and is something of a sipping beer. As you can see from the picture, the carbonation has not fully developed in the bottles, and I think once it does it may provide a counter point to some of that thickness. In either case, it drinks and tastes like a much bigger beer. I genuinely think I could enter this in a competition as an imperial stout and do well with it. I just may. It's absolutely jet black and opaque in the glass. The flavor is dominated by dark malts and roastiness. There is a pronounced dark/unsweetened-chocolate flavor that hits you right up front and dominates the palate. There are some toasty malt notes as well as some berry-like fruitiness followed by some sweetness, but not as much as you might expect. Bitterness from the hops is mild-to-moderate but persistent as is a slight grassiness. The roasty coffee-like flavors and the slight fruitiness gives an experiance very much like drinking cold press coffee, and in a good way.

I think this ended up being a great beer. I don't mean to give myself much credit for that fact: the original recipe from the Barclay Perkins brewing logs is due all the real credit. Had it not been for the vote going the way it did, I probably wouldn't have ever given one of these historic recipes a chance, but I'm glad I did, and I hope to brew others in the future.

International Homebrew Project: Brewday

Last Saturday was the designated brewday for the International Homebrew Project. Sadly, my camera battery died right at the beginning of the brewing so I have no pictures. Posts about brewing without brewing-porn are pretty useless, but as a record, I thought I'd blog my experience. This is a highly unusual recipe, and I did learn some things that would be good to know if I ever brew a historical recipe (likely from Shut Up About Barclay Perkins) some time in the future. I do 3 gallon batches, so I had to scale the recipe up for efficiency and then down. This what I ended up with:

OG: 1.060
IBU 40

2.5 lbs Warminster Maris Otter  51%
0.375 lbs Simpson's Dark Crystal 8%
0.5 lbs Amber malt 10%
0.375 lbs Brown malt  8%
0.375 lbs Roasted barley  8%
0.5 lbs lactose  10%
0.25 invert sugar  5%

0.5 ounces fuggle @ 120 min
0.4 ounces kent golding (super kent at 7.2% AA) @ 90 min

You can see the recipe on hopville here as well. I opted for maris otter because I dislike mild malt. I suspect modern versions of mild malt are nothing like the mild malt of half a century ago, anyhow.

Making the invert sugar was an imprecise process. My small batch size means I only needed 4 ounces of sugar. If I was thinking, I would have made a larger batch of invert and saved some, but as it was, trying to boil 4 ounces of sugar in 8 ounces of water made it very difficult to monitor the temperature. Nonetheless, there did seem to be a noticeable burnt sugar, creme brulee kind of thing going on in the wort sample. It really tasted amazing. The invert sugar flavor paired with roasty and toasty flavors from brown and amber malts on top of coffee and dark chocolate from the roasted barley should make this a really nice beer.

The other thing was the outrageously long boil. My gravity ended a bit high because I boiled off more than expected. Almost 50% boil off at the end of it.

I chose to use Wyeast 1318 which is apparently Boddington's yeast for this batch. I'm not sure why Kristen England recommend this yeast, but I hadn't really used it before, so I wanted to give it a shot. A week before this brewday, I brewed a pale ale (with some Canada malting pale malt - a new variety for me) to prep the yeast. I conducted an open fermentation and skimmed off the first krausen, pictured below. The second krausen that formed was saved in a mason jar, pictured further below, for the IHBP. This also presented a problem as yeast skimmed from actively fermenting beer also contained unfermented wort, so the jar had to be burped periodically to release pressure.

God forgive me for taking so many pictures of yeast. There must be help for people like me.

You can really see what a top cropping and flocculant yeast this is here

A gravity sample yesterday showed the beer at 1.040 which is about half way there since I expect this to finish around 1.018 or so. The partially fermented wort sample tasted much different than expected with almost no sweetness, so it will really be interesting to see how the beer develops.