I'm still sitting here with a great big grin on my face. I haven't yet pestered Phil for the details of what went on, but I can give you the bits that I was involved in.
Each year a group of us from UK Homebrew and the CBA meet up to drink beer and eat meat, which has been going on for more years than I really care to remember. This used to happen in a field near Coventry/Rugby, but when Phil went commercial (or Just before) he invited us down to his place, and offered us the change to brew beer on his big rig (A measly 2.5 BBL at the time). It has always been a challenge to come up with a recipe, and initially we brewed beers from the Durden park book, or directly from historical brewing ledgers.
Phil's equipment grew from the paltry 2.5BBL up to 20BBL, and we set about rising to the challenge, where we would brew 2 beers from one mash tun 2.5BBL of something insanely strong from the first runnings (The rule is nothing less than 10%), and then 10-12BBL from sparging the grist. While coming up with a recipe has been interesting the hard part (that involves a lot of sums :wha: :wha: :hmm: ) is to work it out based on a partigyle. The last couple of years it has fallen to me to do, and this years was a red ale formulated by me . . . . as it happened the colour calculation was wildly out and we ended up with a much darker beer than predicted . . . . it was also quite a bit stronger than expected as well So Phil had to 'let it down' from 14BBL to 18BBL (for
Wibblers Crafty Croc).
Anyway it looks as though someone at Wibblers has done a deal with Greene King to brew the recipe (to a bigger scale) and it will be available from Greene King establishments as American Dark, AFAIK it will be on draft . . .can't wait to see what the brewers at Greene King do to it . . . who knows they might double the hopping rate and actually put 2 hop cones in the kettle
. . . Yeah it ended up slightly under bittered what with all the additional liquor Phil had to add.
I think the lesson I've yet to learn is that when it comes to hopping a big batch is that you can't simply think of a number and then double it . . . . It's more like 4 or 5 times the amount :rofl:
