As @strange-steve said, historic amber malt would have been kilned at lower temperatures to retain diastatic activity ... or to be more accurately at lower average temperature through the grain bed than modern-day amber malt. Temperature control was less controllable with the grain in beds than "modern" means ("modern" ... relatively speaking as rotating drums for kilning have been around since mid-19th century). The bit of colouring due to some grain being kilned darker accounted for the overall colour; speed the process up and you end up with diastatic brown malt.
I did this one recently - Cobb & co 1823 amber small beer. I would recomend you make your amber following the instructions in the book. Smelt amazing. The beer was very nice, quite bitter but not too much, nice floral aroma and strong toffee flavours from the amber malt. I'll definitely be brewing this one again.
The durden park recipe is the 1796 Bass visitors book amber ale which uses 33% amber. I do have a Chevallier (80%) + imperial malt(13%)pale ale I'm looking to make next weekend actually. This diastatic amber is 50 EBC, and looking on the website claims to be Belgian in origin.
That definently sounds worth giving a try, good use of the spare pale malt I've got
I think it will be worth a try, and probably will add good flavours. But do not confuse it with being "historically" correct. It is no more historically correct (as if that matters) than my use of "Imperial Malt" in place of amber malt (or "Dark Munich Malt", or the other substitutes). It might remain marginally diastatic as the enzymes might survive the cooking in the oven (no guarantee, but as I said earlier, if the remaining 70% of grain is pale malt that will be enough to do the job).
That is the actual name they've given the malt, other than that there aren't too many details I can find.
Missed this reply, sorry. The 1796 Amber Ale, I've been overlooking that too, and the preceding 1823 Amber Ale (the "Amber Small Beer's" big brother from same source) which is about the same as the 1796 except no spice and almost twice the hops and therefore considerably longer maturing time to moderate the extra bitterness. They both pre-date drum roasters so the amber (and pale) malts were possibly artisan products from the countryside and diastatic, roasted carefully over "clean" coke fires (the masses will have been drinking "Porter" made from brown malt kilned less carefully over possibly smoky wood fires).
Yup. AMber malt, bought or home-made, smells and tastes like nothing else. If you're looking at recipe #1 in the Durden Park book, I've made it twice and it has a most unusual flavour and makes you thirsty as you drink it. Let it mature and it's a very nice, if unusual, beer.
Have to say I drank mine quite young and thoroughly enjoyed it. Maybe because my usual go to beer for a while now has been Pattinsons recipe for 1864 Lovibond XB which is considerably more bitter, and I prefer that young too - great floral hop aroma if drunk within a few weeks of bottling.
I'm sure I've got his recipe somewhere, Lovibond being such a memorable and daft name for a beer. It certainly sounds like the stuff I like to drink, too. So I might even have a go at it.
You might be referring to "little brother" (#1) 'cos I know you've made that. I was worried my writing wasn't making it clear that I'd started talking about #85 ("big brother"!); twice the gravity (1.081) and twice the hops. Cobb & Co seem to have a habit of using loads of amber malt back then.
I'll be looking to make #85 using regular Amber first I think, see how that turns out then experiment with the others
As promised above, I've just knocked up a batch of 1864 Lovibond according to Pattinsons's recipe in "Vintage Beers" He uses 3 charges of 2 oz of Goldings in an unspecified batch size, which, working backwards, I put at 25-26 litres. He claims 80+ IBUs, which I have difficulty getting from the stated quantities of hops with 5% alpha acid. So I've gone by weight instead of IBUs (as the brewers would have done in 1864).
No #1.
