Brewday - 24/05/2017 Best Bitter

Not Craft Beer

After the excitement of making my own invert sugar I felt inspired to brew a traditional English Best Bitter, using just fuggles hops as I had some spare.

Recipe (BIAB):

• Mash for 1 hr at 67°C
• Boil for 60 mins
• Mash water volume 30lt
• Maris Otter 3.5kg
• Carapils 125g
• Black malt 40g 
• Invert Sugar No. 1 450g (30 mins)
• Fuggles 50g (60 mins)
• Fuggles 50g (15 mins)
• Irish Moss 1 tsp (15 mins)
• Gervin GV12 English Ale Yeast 11g pack
• Recipe in Brewers Friend

Results:

I got 23lt in the fermenter, the OG was 1.045 (exactly as expected!) and hopefully it should finish around 1.011 (4.5% abv).

Invert Sugar

DIY Invert Sugar

To brew proper boring brown beer (ie traditional English bitter) you need to use invert sugar. This is not an ingredient easily available to homebrewers, although Lyle's Golden Syrup is a reasonable substitute as it is a partially inverted sugar syrup. However it is fairly straightforward to make it at home. I have just made 500g using:

Unrefined cane sugar 500g

Water 250ml

Cream of Tartar ¼ teaspoon

Bring the water to the boil and remove from the heat.
Next dissolve the sugar and add the cream of tartar and when fully dissolved return to hob, stir well and heat to 115°C.
Reduce heat and simmer without stirring for 20-30 minutes. Boiling for longer results in a darker colour. 

While it was simmering it gave off a pleasant aroma similar to a can of liquid malt extract, which must be a good sign! Once cooled it tasted like toffee.

Next job is to brew a best bitter!

Beer Audit

Beer, Beer everywhere (and quite a lot to drink)

As I rapidly approach my sixth decade on the planet I find I'm brewing faster than I can drink. Bearing this in mind I conducted a stock-take, with the following results.

• Alt Bier 11 x 500ml
• Pale Ale 6 x 500ml
• Porter 30 x 500ml
• Another Pale Ale 33 x 500ml, 21 x 330ml
• Enough ingredients (except 1 pack of yeast) to brew another 45 litres (two more brewdays)

So 90 odd litres of beer in one form or another.

I have entered two homebrew competitions so I will probably send my most recent pale ale to those and I'm also involved with the Manchester Beer Week Homebrew Exposition which takes place on Sunday July 2nd. This event involves several homebrewers giving away free beer (free beer!) so I might need a fair amount for this. Looks like I need to brew some more beer.

Bottling - Another Pale Ale

More Bottling Fun

Time to bottle the pale ale made last week. It's been in the fermenter for eight days, dry hopped for the final three days. There had been no apparent airlock activity for four days so I took a couple of gravity readings over two days using my recently acquired specialised sampling system (or turkey baster as it's more commonly known) and both results were the same. The FG reading was 1.014, a bit higher than expected (1.011) giving an ABV of 4.2%. I tend to always aim for a theoretical ABV of 4.5%+ knowing that I will still get well over 4% even if things don't turn out exactly as planned.