Meanbrews analysis of winning Old Ale recipes
- Thread starter Meanbrews
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An English Old Ale with Munich, Aromatic and Special Roast malts.
Do people make the Meanbrew recipes and report back?
The Brewfather recipes get updated with any medals the recipe wins.
For example - https://web.brewfather.app/share/Cyg8l3MjD961qi6FsMzEKoFTcMEFlX
dmtaylor
Lord Idiot the Lazy
This is the first time I ever heard him/you acknowledge the recent genetic analyses of yeast, causing separation out of S-04 from other strains. But I actually agree that WLP007 will give a similar beer to S-04. Not sure about 1098 though... probably still similar, but not quite the same. More experiments are needed.
yes I quite frequently reference this database
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I appreciate the intent but if ever a "style" was not suited to a data-driven approach it is Old Ale, which despite what the BJCP may make out, in the UK varies across time and geography so that in effect the same phrase gets applied to three completely different styles of beer. If you try to average between those three different styles you end up with a dog's dinner that is typical of none of them. I went into more detail on this over on HBT :
https://www.homebrewtalk.com/threads/english-ales-whats-your-favorite-recipe.472464/post-10320112
And then of course any data analysis is only as good as the data it is built on. Now I get that if the objective is to win USian competitions judged by USian judges then there is some merit in looking at what wins in the US, but there does come a point where what happens in the US is so divorced from the reality in the original country that one questions how meaningful it is to look at US data. Sometimes it's just a question of understanding the culture of the originating country - for instance the UK taxes beer on ABV not volume, and until recently had a big step in tax above 7.5% ABV (recently bumped to 8.5% but effectively made more savage). So the kind of beer we're talking about is effectively limited for tax reasons to 7.5%, OGs of 1.089 or more are just fantasy.
But it gets worse, as if you were to adjust for volumes sold, then the average OG for beers sold as Old Ale in the UK is probably under 1.050 as most of it is the style that substitutes for dark mild in the southeast. I speak as someone who lost several of his student days to the pub in town that was notorious for sometimes having Owd Rodger on, which is one of the benchmark beers cited by the BJCP for the style. These days it's at the classic tax-dodging ABV of 7.4%, but whatever it was back then (my memory is it was 6.something), was more than most of us teenagers were used to!
Another cultural point is that US brewing is so dominated by German thinking that they just do not understand British water treatment - if you're brewing for cask, you need the yeast to flocc, which means you need at least 100ppm calcium. And that in turn has all sorts of implications for the contribution of water to the flavour of the beer. If you see a recipe for a British style that has less than 100ppm calcium, you just know it's going to have a whole bunch of other things wrong with it.
Don't take any of this personally, these are perennial complaints, but I just hate to see effort going into something which ends up being so far from reality and there's enough ...misguided... information about old ales without adding to it.
RoomWithABrew
Landlord.
For sure a meanbrews analysis of a winning best bitter will be a mile away from a pint of Harveys, TT etc.
appreciate the feedback. I try not to put interpretation or say, "thats not whats done, lets make this right" The whole approach is to present analysis of the data without adding bias. I may disagree with it personally, but theres little value in me injecting my opinion or experience into the videos stating whats right/wrong. I only show what wins.
