An Ankoù brewday:

[Cwrw666]

Ah. So you think it's worth the effort and there's an improvement over "bought" amber malt?

Actually I've never bought amber malt. I'm assuming from what I've read that it's got little or no diastatic power so you can't use so much in recipes. Greg Hughes says max usage is 10%, yet the small beer recipe uses about 33% and is lovely. So I think the home made if gently done is more diastatic (think that's the right word). It also smells lovely fresh out of the oven which I can't imagine something out of a plastic bag that might be 6 months old doing. Fresh is always better in ingredients.

 

[An Ankoù]

Actually I've never bought amber malt. I'm assuming from what I've read that it's got little or nue o diastatic power so you can't use so much in recipes. Greg Hughes says max usage is 10%, yet the small beer recipe uses about 33% and is lovely. So I think the home made if gently done is more diastatic (think that's the right word). It also smells lovely fresh out of the oven which I can't imagine something out of a plastic bag that might be 6 months old doing. Fresh is always better in ingredients.

True enough. Nevertheless, I used Crisp's Amber Malt at the rate of 1.25 : 2.75 of Crisp's Best Pale and it converted OK. I think the reason I haven't tried it yet is that I always get my malt crushed and it needs whole malt to roast in the oven. I'll get some whole malt in and give it a try.

 

[Cwrw666]

Never thought of that. I only get whole malt since I accidentaly ordered a sack of whole pale malt instead of crushed so I bought a cheap grinder so that I could use it (even though it would have been cheaper just to have reordered the right stuff!)
My efficiency leapt from the low 60s to mid 80s which is why I've stuck with it.

 

[pilgrimhudd]

Never thought of that. I only get whole malt since I accidentaly ordered a sack of whole pale malt instead of crushed so I bought a cheap grinder so that I could use it (even though it would have been cheaper just to have reordered the right stuff!)
My efficiency leapt from the low 60s to mid 80s which is why I've stuck with it.

I made the same mistake and was going to buy a grinder but wimped out, can I ask which one you got?

 

[Cheshire Cat]

Have you guys roasted Wheat malt as I want some chocolate wheat and most outlets don't sell it.

 

[An Ankoù]

Here's yesterday's brew which is now in danger of bursting out of the fermenter. It's an Altbier, but I'm going to call it Gale Ale. Nothing to do with Gruit, but I'd mashed overnight and the weather the next morning was not as forecast: rather a gale was blowing which meant I had to rearrange my gas burners and windbreaks and everything before I could even start. Needless to say, by the time I'd finished and started the washing up, the wind had dropped and it was as still as a millpond, but that's life, innit!

Yonks ago, long before the Covid Era (CE) I had a five-for-a-tenner lucky dip of liquid yeasts from Brew UK, among which was Wyeast 1007 German Ale. I'd never used it before and was at a loss for what to do with it, but it cultured up ok and I built the culture even more by making a half batch of American Wheat Beer while waiting for my Caramunich III to arrive.

Far be it from me to dispute Holy Writ, but some of Greg Hughes' interpretations of German styles leave me uneasy. My Vienna lager including chocolate malt and melanoidin malt was horrible and I threw the last bottles away. His wanting to include 800 g of caramel malts as opposed to about 120 g in other recipes rang some alarm bells so I conflated his recipe with those provided by Strong (Recipes) and Colby. Each has their idiosyncrasies: Strong uses a bit of wheat malt and Colby uses 25 ebc Munich as well as 15 ebc. Anyway here's what I came up with:

Gale Ale (Altbier)
Batch size 23 litres. OG 1050. Expected FG 1012. IBUs 35

Dusseldorf water is hard so 2 tsp Calcium Sulphate and all water treated for chlorine / chloramine anyway.
3 Kg Bestmalz Pilsner malt
2.5 Kg Bestmalz Munich 15 ebc
350 g Wheat malt
145 g Caramunich III
75 g Carafa Special # 3
Magnum to 25 IBUs and Saaz to 10 IBUs FWH
I'd planned a flameout addition of 12g Saaz, but didn't do it in the end.

75 minute boil. ½ tablet of protofloc last 15 minutes.
Collected 26 litres at 1049. Pitched with Wyeast 1007, which is now going like something that properly belongs in Mordor. Have moved it into a cold room where ambient temp is 12-13 C. Bottom of fermentation range for 1007 is 13C.

I haven't forgotten the marmalade wine.

Edit: Sunday afternoon. This yeast's crazy! I've had to unseal the lid half way round and cover the fermenter with a towel. And it's seeping out.

 

[Cwrw666]

I made the same mistake and was going to buy a grinder but wimped out, can I ask which one you got?

One of these - cost about £30 if I remember correctly. Warning: it takes 120 turns of the handle to mill a Lb of grain.

 

[An Ankoù]

One of these - cost about £30 if I remember correctly. Warning: it takes 120 turns of the handle to mill a Lb of grain.View attachment 40114

Same as mine. If I go whole grain, I'll get a roller mill and I think that's why I haven't done it. Mine makes so much dust that I have to cover the hopper and the grinder with a tea towel.

 

[Cwrw666]

You must be whizzing it round at a heck of a speed. I did try using a drill to turn it which was amazingly fast but burned the drill out pretty quickly. Been thinking of mounting it on my lathe as that turns much slower than a drill but so far haven't got round to it.

 

[eyuptm]

Hi An Ankou, I recall that you replied to a comment about removing the gas in tube on a corny keg. I'm hoping to use floating dip tubes in my Cornies, but wondering how you deal the gas in post if there's no dip tube/o ring? If it WASN'T your reply, I apologise..!!!

 

[peebee]

I've got a few to catch up on here, not least that I threatened to post a recipe for my marmalade wine, I think @Northernblues123 started a thread on jam wine. Well, I'll catch up on those tomorrow but for today I want to talk about yesterday's brew, which was taken from the Durden Park booklet, recipe #122, Brown Stout (1835) William Black. I still had 2 Kg of my "well past its use by date" brown malt left so I scaled the recipe up to 16 litres and because I wasn't particularly concerned to reach the 101 IBUs that using the fuggles at recipe rates would have given, and because I had a bag of "well past its use by date" Sovereign in the freezer, I decided to substitute those for "authenticity". Here's the recipe. They describe it as "A mouth-filling, strong Scottish porter with a soft roast flavour" :
16 litres : OG 1077 : IBUs 101 (calculated from recipe)
Pale Malt 2Kg
Amber Malt 2 Kg
Brown Malt 2Kg
Black Malt 140g
Overnight mash started at 64C allowed to fall a couple of degrees in first hour with 8 ml Amyloglucosidase 300 (which is optimised at 60C).
150g Sovereign 2016 harvest at 5.4% alpha acid (cones). FWH.
75 minute boil with ½ a protofloc tablet last 15 mins.
Dry hop with 10g fuggles
Pitched with 1st generation MJ M36

The first thing to note about this recipe is that it smells gorgeous from mash through sparge through boil. It's like walking past a coffee roaster's shop, but it's not just coffee. It's intensely rich in colour and the flavour of the unhopped wort is like you could just drink it from the mash tun.
Enough of all that.

I collected 30 litres of wort sparging well, I thought, but obviously not that well as the last runnings were still sweet and dark. So I collected another 8 or 9 litres and boiled it up separately to make a mild.

After the boil, I ended up with just over 15 litres of hopped wort with an OG of 1070. I'm perfectly happy with that since, as I've mentioned before, I'm a pints swiller rather than a sipper, and I pitched it yesterday evening with a flask of M36 from a previous brew.

As for the mild, I boiled that up with enough EKGs to give me 25 IBUs and let it cool overnight as I had a lamb curry to make. In fact I've probably got nearer to 30 IBUs as I boiled off more than I expected. Ended up with the merest tad over 6 litres with an OG of 1030. Scraped some of the head off yesterday's brew to start off this morning's mild and Bob's your uncle. Also have the tale of today's beer to tell, but that can wait.

I usually give the spent grain to next door's chickens, but unsure whether the undenatured enzyme might produce Frankenhens, so this lot went on the compost heap.

I'll be interested how this goes! William Black's brewery was held in very high esteem for stout and porter apparently, the name of his home (still there; the house, not William Black!) was resurrected by a recent Aberdeen brewer (Devanha Brewery, Alford, sadly gone).

There's a few of these 1:1:1 recipes in that Durden Park booklet and often turning to enzymes to get conversion. Obviously, the original brewers couldn't turn to enzymes, but as most of the recipes date from early 19th century I guess they fall into Martyn Cornell's "Late Mesoporter" category:

‘Late mesoporter’ (c.1790–c.1820) Generally brewed from a mixture of pale and brown malts, or pale, amber and brown malts; most sent out mild, the remainder vatted for up to two years before sending out to publicans as ‘stale’ or ‘entire’ for mixing with the mild porter. Colour: variable but dark brown

Cornell, Martyn. Amber, Gold & Black (p. 68). The History Press. Kindle Edition.

As this pre-dates rotating drum kilns I suspect the malt is kilned by more haphazard processes and remained somewhat diastatic.

Making diastatic amber and brown malt is only for "enthusiasts", but I'm tempted to try my contrived method of simulating traditional (diastatic) brown malt adapted to simulate these 1:1:1 grists. The other option is try the booklet's method of home-roasting amber and brown malts which I've been a bit scathing of previously (but there are brewers on this forum who highly rate the process, e.g. @Cwrw666) but if the grains are layed fairly thickly, and not disturbed too much perhaps the process will create something akin to traditional malt (i.e. remain diastatic) and not emulate modern uniformly kilned malt? Perhaps even dampen the "brown malt" to encourage a bit of "stewing"?

I mention this to try and get someone else to give it a go and report back with success or failure, because realistically I'll never get around to it!

 

[Cwrw666]

there are brewers on this forum who highly rate the process, e.g. @Cwrw666)

I only rate it because 1. It's really easy to do, and 2. I've made a couple of beers using the amber and they've both been excellent. On another thread several people had made the Cobb amber small beer (33%amber) but used commercial amber malt and really didn't like the end result. Based on the 2 attempts I've made with the home made stuff I can only assume that's because the home made stuff is different from the commercial.

 

[peebee]

@Cwrw666: Rereading the booklet's instructions (Pg. 69) it seems they are well ahead of my thinking; 50 years ahead! Pg. 70 provides instructions for diastatic amber malt, pointing out that colour should be viewed as "average", and stirring is optional (I'd say "don't stir"). What has overtaken their description is "Carapils" which has transmuted to EBC2-4 ("Dextrin Malt") and been replaced with "Caramalt" (EBC25). Though I wouldn't see Caramalt as a substitute for Pale Amber.

I've tried Cobb & Cos Small Amber Beer and it was terribly "drying" (astringent). Based on your observations, I'll try it again with homemade amber malt ahead of doing the William Black 1835 Brown Stout. Or will @An Ankoù beat me to it?

 

[Cwrw666]

I've tried Cobb & Cos Small Amber Beer and it was terribly "drying" (astringent). Based on your observations, I'll try it again with homemade amber malt ahead of doing the William Black 1835 Brown Stout. Or will @An Ankoù beat me to it?

Hope it works out to your liking. Mine have definitely not been dry and astringent. Expect lovely floral aromas from the fuggles and `thick' toffee flavours from the amber. Mine fermented out to 1010 both times, so not too many unfermentable sugars either. For yeast I used CML USA pale ale first time and Gervin the second for similar results taste-wise.

 

[Cwrw666]

Oh, forgot to mention that I add the hops in 3 doses at 90, 60, and 30 minutes the same as many Pattinson recipes. The Durden recipes don't mention hop timings at all.
No idea why you get such good hop aromas when there's no late hop additions though.

I'll shut up now as I seem to be hijacking the thread!

 

[An Ankoù]

I've tried Cobb & Cos Small Amber Beer and it was terribly "drying" (astringent). Based on your observations, I'll try it again with homemade amber malt ahead of doing the William Black 1835 Brown Stout. Or will @An Ankoù beat me to it?

This is recipe #1 in the DPBC booklet, I think. Yes, I've made it twice and yes, it's very drying. The more you drink the thirstier you get, but I wouldn't call it astringent. But, if you let it mature in the bottle for a few months it really mellows out. I haven't tried making my own amber malt yet, but I'm still going to make another one with crisps Amber.
I beat you to it. I made Black's Brown stout (this thread post #98) and as there was still some goodness left in the malt after i'd got my brewlength, I knocked up 5-6 litres of "Black's Mild" (my invention) at OG 1030, too.

 

[An Ankoù]

Not a brewday, but a racking and bottling day.

Black's Brown Stout above:
Racked into secondary. RG 1012, 12 g dry hops added- not specified in recipe so got rid of rest of a packet of Saaz. Tastes amazing. Vit C added according to @DocAnna 's suggestions to deoxygenate the considerable headspace in the secondary FV.

Black's Mild (2nd sparge from stout)
Nearly clear and gravity has fallen to 1006 so it's getting bottled today. Tastes absolutely amazing- so rich in flavour and decent body. 3.15% abv- say 3.2 with the priming sugar. I think I'm going to be making this as a mild again.

Gale Ale Altbier above:
This German ale yeast (1007) was wild. The beer still has a think crust of yeast on top even though the beer underneath it is beginning to clear. I really want to get the beer off all this yeast. RG 1010 it tastes lovely and much sweeter than I would have expected for its RG!
American Wheat Beer

American Wheat Beer above post #97
This one's getting bottled today. FG 1006. The OG was well down to only 1050, but even so, I expected something a bit more exciting. It's light and fluffy and will be fine when it's carbed up and chilled, but not all that different to a blanche, in fact. This one uses Eldorado hops, which, so far, are not blowing me away. But: give the lad a chance and lets see how he scrubs up.

Vienna Lager above
That's odd. i added an entry for this and it's gone missing!
Racked into secondary. RG 1006. Lovely colour although still a bit murky. Tastes great with a rich maltiness from the Munich. I'll leave this in secondary for a good few weeks before bottling. Bottoms saved for next brew.

Just got the two beers to bottle now and wash up the fermenters and then a nice sit down in the knowledge of a job well done.

 

[peebee]

This is recipe #1 in the DPBC booklet, I think. Yes, I've made it twice and yes, it's very drying. The more you drink the thirstier you get, but I wouldn't call it astringent. ...

You wouldn't call it astringent, but astringency is what you are describing ("The more you drink the thirstier you get"). I hope you are not making the mistake seen a lot around here ... that you "taste" astringency, because you can't! Astringency is a feeling, not a taste. I was surprised amber malt was so astringent as it is much more lightly roasted than black malt (which people do know is astringent). Actually I didn't use amber malt in my "Small Amber Beer", I used the slightly less roasted "imperial malt" from Crisp.

... But, if you let it mature in the bottle for a few months it really mellows out. I haven't tried making my own amber malt yet, but I'm still going to make another one with crisps Amber.
I beat you to it. I made Black's Brown stout (this thread post #98) and as there was still some goodness left in the malt after i'd got my brewlength, I knocked up 5-6 litres of "Black's Mild" (my invention) at OG 1030, too.

I know you've made Black's Brown Stout, I was referring to the possibility you might try the "home-made" amber and black malt in comparative re-make? It was "wishful" thinking, I might do it myself but it will probably be 2031! If I survive the Covid29 virus!

 

[An Ankoù]

You wouldn't call it astringent, but astringency is what you are describing ("The more you drink the thirstier you get"). I hope you are not making the mistake seen a lot around here ... that you "taste" astringency, because you can't! Astringency is a feeling, not a taste. I was surprised amber malt was so astringent as it is much more lightly roasted than black malt (which people do know is astringent). Actually I didn't use amber malt in my "Small Amber Beer", I used the slightly less roasted "imperial malt" from Crisp.

I know you've made Black's Brown Stout, I was referring to the possibility you might try the "home-made" amber and black malt in comparative re-make? It was "wishful" thinking, I might do it myself but it will probably be 2031! If I survive the Covid29 virus!

To be clear, then. What I call astringency is sensation I get at each side of the tongue after biting into a sloe Berry. I agree, it's not a flavour, it's something that makes the mouth "pucker". I haven't any left so I can't say for sure, but I don't recall that sensation. However I do plan on making some.
I've made beers using Simpsons Imperial including a Smash and I use it instead of Pale Amber in my Simonds Bitter DPBC. The flavour is distinctive, but quite different to that of the Crisp's Amber 50 ebc that I used in the Cobb and Co.
Sorry I misunderstood you re the brown stout, but no, I haven't tried making my own yet. I'll need to get some uncrushed malt. Although I have got a few kilos of uncrushed Belgian pale that need using up so might have a go with that.

 

[An Ankoù]

A couple of brews this weekend. I had a craving for something dark and rich but, quaffable like a really solid mild so I wet my finger, stuck it in the air to see which way the wind was blowing and came up with this recipe. I've no idea whether it'll be good, bad or indifferent, but I'm hoping it'll fit the bill:

Mild Stout
20 litre batch : OG 1040 : IBUs 25 : Brewed in my 12 litre pot and liquored back accordingly.
A good half teaspoonful of calcium chloride
1.575 Kg Chevallier Malt
1.575 Kg Wheat Malt
350 g Cara Wheat (120 ebc)
200 g Chocolate Wheat (1050 ebc)
Bittered with Bramling Cross hops (FWH)
No late hops
Overnight mash at 66C
75 minute boil, protofloc last 15 minutes
Pitched with slurry of Young's Ale Yeast

The second brew is a trial of a heritage malt- Crisp's Hanà Pilsner Malt. I've done a SMaSH with Saaz so I can taste the malt.

Hanà Pilsner
25 litre batch : Target OG 1050 (I don't know what the yield of Hanà is like) : IBUs 43
Brew a bit short and liquor back to 1050.
5 Kg Hanà Pilsner Malt
75 g Acid Malt
Bittering hops: Saaz hops to 40 IBUs (FWH)
28 g Saaz and ½ tab protofloc last 15 minutes
28 g Saaz at flameout
Overnight mash at 66C
75 minute boil
Piched with 1 sachet rehydrated MJ M84 Bohemian Lager Yeast

Edit:
I collected 24 litres of wort with an OG of 1042- much less than anticipated. My sparge was spot on and the very last runnings were nigh on tasteless. My conclusion is that Hanà malt yields nearly 20% less fermentables than, say, Bestmalz Pilsner. Still, the abv and IBUs will be about identical to Pilsener Urquel- no bad thing. The wort, too is very, very pale. Just like Bestmalz Best Heidelberg.