I'm concerned about online recipes

[brewtim]

Living in the UK, it is possible to make bottle and cask comparisons of the same English style beers and for the one's I've tried, there are differences in flavour - bottled versions of the same beer appear to be more bitter, hoppy and carbonated than their cask, hand-pulled counterparts and have lost some of the character of the original beer.

I read somewhere that this difference is due to the commercialisation of beer and global markets and that international consumers expect a beer to be hoppy and bitter even if it's original English style was not necessarily so, therefore breweries brew their bottled beers for the international market rather than the domestic UK market. This means that the bottled version has lost it's original character.

So putting 2+2 and getting 3, it would seem to me that the majority of international homebrewers (possibly a good number of domestic homebrewers also) then go on to re-create beers that they have tasted from a bottle rather than from a hand-pulled cask. This would then skew the ingredients posted in various online recipes leading to brews that are only true to the bottle version and not the original cask version.

To try and get back to the original cask flavour one would need to cross reference various book recipes and 'old time' journals somewhere to make an educated guess at a recipe, or maybe brewing experience counts for alot.

Anyone specialising in English styles noticed this? And have you adapted your own recipes to make allowances?

:wha: :ugeek:

 

[rpt]

Pulling beer through a beer engine, especially with a sparkler, will affect the taste. Hoppiness will be reduced. Carbonation is lower too.

 

[graysalchemy]

Yeast accounts for about 70% of a beers flavour so unless you are using brewery yeast then you are only ever going to get an approximation, also factor in the effects of fermentation temp mash temps, water chemistry etc etc.

Finally I find that a lot of american sites the recipes are perhaps either a little lost in translation or someone's interpretation of how they think a UK beer should taste.

I personally don't want to recreated a beer perfectly but use it as a basis to make an approximation.

 

[Hoppy]

The main reason bottled beers are dissimilar to their cask counterparts is due to the processing after fermentation.
Hi All

These beers sometimes tend to be slightly higher in ABV, this is because they put more malt in, in an attempt to retain body after filtration, as dextrins or 'unfermentables' are indeed filtered out. If you have a higher OG to begin with this means you have more dextrins to counter filtration.
The ABV is also lowered during filtration, (absorption) usually by 0.1 to 0.2%ABV, so if the brewery has not added extra malt, they will ferment further to attain higher ABV pre-filtration.
Both these effects have a tendency to 'expose' hoppiness by unbalancing the beer.

CAMRA have said for years that pulling beer flat increases hoppy character, because you are not driving off aroma.

Picture this, pull a beer quickly for and 8th of a pint then slowly fill the rest of the glass, you don't drive off aroma and you increase the head surface area by 600X (approx. in test at Brewing Research Institute), more aroma. A tight head =more aroma from larger surface area.
Beer served flat, no head=full pint. CAMRA politics I'm afraid.

WBR

H

 

[peelman]

Being a relative noob to the home brew hobby, I relied heavily on clone recipes from books and online. My 2 favourites tasted something like the originals but I doubt they taste identical (I never did a side by side test). But there again I'm not that worried as long as I think they are in the same ballpark as the original and they taste good.
Perhaps I am aiming my sights too low?

 

[fbsf]

Peelman, for me you have hit the nail on the head.

Homebrewing for me is about producing high quality beer, and using recipes to give me a guide as to how the beer will turn out, rather than attempting to 100% clone a commercial beer.

Once you have that thought process, you can tailor the beer to how you think it should be.