Ajhutch posted this in 2016 -
This one was for a Christmas themed party weekend at the end of August (yes really) and I wanted to try to recreate the flavours of a Christmas pudding in beer form. This produced just about 15 litres into the fermenter and bottled 26 x 500ml.
1kg Maris Otter
500g Munich
350g Melanoiden
200g Crystal 60
200g Crystal 40
200g Torrified Wheat
300g amber dry extract
20g Challenger hops at 60 mins
10g dried orange peel at 10 mins
I used a heavy proportion of adjunct malts to try and get the flavours of a Christmas pudding out (cake/biscuit - melanoiden, burnt sugar - caramel malt, raisin - munich malt) and accepted the loss of efficiency this would bring. I had plenty of extract on hand so that I could top up during the boil to try and hit a sensible opening gravity. On balance I ended up adding less than I thought I might have to to hit a fairly sessionable 1.045 OG. Hops were for bittering and balance only.
Fermentation was tricky as it was the height of summer and I don't have temperature control, I was regularly rotating ice packs into a trug of water to keep it around 18C. I used a rehydrated S04.
I made a tincture of cinammon stick, cloves and grated ginger with some crushed sultanas in brandy (because Christmas pudding) and added this ahead of bottling.
Overall the beer was well received but I wasn't thrilled with it. It fermented out to 1.011 and with the addition of the spices this was too dry to the taste. I also definitely had too much hop given the contribution to bitterness from the spices.
I think the base beer was decent and the flavour additions were decent (the tincture tasted absolutely delicious, I kept a little out of the beer to try it) but put together they didn't quite work. I didn't necessarily expect the FG would be as low as it was given all the speciality malts but I guess any one of a number of things could have happened.
Overall, given this was fairly experimental I wasn't unhappy with it, I felt like there was something there to fine tune rather than needing to throw it away and start again.
