Cobweb ale

I dusted the cobwebs off my brewing equipment yesterday. Literally. Too long a stint in the attic draped them with silken threads. Another golden ale was my plan yesterday, but this time with a little more body than the last one. To this end I added 10% dextrin malt to the grist, which will fill out the body but will not alter golden colour I desire. It looked like this:

3.9 kg Maris Otter
400 g Carapils

35g Northdown 60 mins
15g Cascade 20 mins
15g Centennial 10 mins
15g Centennial 0 mins

Mashed at 66 C

40 IBU

Saf o5

OG 1.040

I made modest additions of calcium sulphate and calcium chloride to boost the calcium in my liquor and add some fullness. I had to make some major adjustments to my tap water because a grist that pale will not tolerate 200 ppm alkalinity, which is what I found in my water. I used lactic acid to bring the pH down to around 5.5 which corresponds to alkalinity of around 25 ppm.

While brewing I sampled two ales from this quarter's CAMRA beer club delivery. Interestingly, in the literature with the delivery CAMRA almost apologised for the inclusion of a golden ale, noting that a great many of them are not up to standard. I have whinged about this for quite some time, having been plagued with entire deliveries from CAMRA of listless, thin and gassy golden ales. Crop Circle from the Hopback Brewery was the worrisome golden ale in this delivery, but it can't be dismissed as bland. In fact this ale packs quite a bit of flavour, with a harsh hop character. Lemons strike you on the nose and the addition of maize to this beer gives it a lighter body. Along with this I tried Potholer from Cheddar Ales. This is my kind of English ale. Full biscuit malt with lip smacking, well rounded hop bitterness, topped off with rich foam and a mouth watering copper hue.

Cold Real Ale? Surely Not.

The good people at Ridgeway Brewing suggest that their Blue beer is chilled cooler than your average bottle conditioned ale as it has been brewed specifically to be enjoyed cold on hot summer days. This brewery has previously served me well with a wonderful IPA brewed entirley with whole leave aroma hops, so I followed their suggestion and chilled this bottle to cooler than my preferred real ale serving temperature. I am not altogether sure what they have done with this beer to make it more drinkable at colder temperatures, but it is a flavour packed ale with lip smacking bitterness and a long, long English hop finish. Perhaps their attempts at making this beer cold friendly extended little beyond packing it with flavour so that it still satisfied at the lower temperatures where many ales lose their character. Upon warming other flavours present themselves, a slightly lemon note creeps in and the malt starts to speak giving a better balance. I'm very happy with this beer not only because it taste great but it also reverses the trend in bland golden ales that I have experienced over the last while. This is clearly a golden ale that is attempting to penetrate the lager market, but in this instance it really is a genuine alternative to the more tasty lagers available.

Another Golden Ale

It's Summer time here in Ireland (apparently) so it is only proper that I brew a golden ale to reflect the lazy summer days. In truth, summer hasn't really kicked off in Ireland yet and is unlikely to, save for a few sunny days here and there, so this isn't the real reason I brewed a golden ale. My true motivation is a sustained disgust with so many of the golden ales that have been inflicted upon me over the last year or so. They proved more often than not to lack any body or flavour and were invariably gassy as hell, no doubt in an attempt to offer a refreshing experience. My previous golden ale was a similar protest brew with an American slant. This one has a decidedly English lean to it, except perhaps for the Styrian Goldings, but they strike me as a good hop for a golden ale so I tossed them in.

4.60kg Maris Otter
200g Cara Pils

40g Challenger 7% AA @ 60 minutes
Styrian Goldings 4% AA @ 20, 10 & 0 minutes

Mashed at 66 C

37 IBU anticipated

Saf Ale 04 yeast

SG 12 Plato

I'm running low on barrel beer so the tendency of Saf 04 to drop like a stone after it has done its work will enable me to sup on this beer very soon indeed. I've never used it before, some people have described its flavour character as 'bready' which should prove interesting, or ruin the beer entirely. We'll just have to wait and see.

A curious case of accidental cloning

I'm not really into cloning commercial beers when I brew my own, but I have attempted to replicate a style or more likely a particular flavour character that I enjoyed. I had this in mind when I brewed the golden ale that graces the top left of my blog. I was tired of the gassy, listless golden ales that were inflicted upon me in last autumn's CAMRA beer club delivery so took matters into my own hands with a decent golden ale packed full of flavour. The beer upon which I based the idea was Harpoon IPA, which isn't a golden ale in the same sense as the disappointing ones I had tried, but it had the colour and more importantly the glorious hop flavour I sort. So with this beer in mind I put together a recipe with pale malt and cara pils to keep the colour to a minimum and added to these a heroic amount of hops. All I planned to emulate from the Harpoon ale was the colour and hop flavour but thanks to an unexpected jump in my mash efficiency and more vigorous than normal boil, the original gravity strayed into the low side of the IPA scale. At the end of it all the beer came in stronger than expected and almost matched the IPA I had tenuously based in on.

My memory of Harpoon’s IPA was hazy, it being quite a while since I had tasted it, but the recent influx of American beer to our shores has brought this beer along with it. I spied it in Mc Hugh’s the other week and thought it a good opportunity to try it once again. I have fond memories of this beer because I visited the brewery a couple of years back and enjoyed one of the best brewery tours to date. It was very intimate with only three or four punters coupled with a very enthusiastic brewer who splashed the free samples about with gusto. The bottled beer is inevitably less fresh than the one I tried in the brewery, with a considerable drop off in hop character, but I still find it very tasty and hope to see it more readily available in Ireland. It was upon sampling this most recent bottle that I realised how much my home brewed beer tasted like the commercial brew. It packed the same hop flavour and slight residual sweetness, and the rocky foam clung beautifully to the glass. The commercial beer was perhaps a shade deeper, but they were otherwise quite comparable.

The funny thing is, if I had attempted to clone this beer from the outset I am sure I wouldn’t have got nearly as close to its flavour and character. More than likely I would have over thought the whole process trying to imagine what American brewers put in their beer and opted for Vienna or Munich malts and a dry hopping regime. This would have thrown the whole thing out of kilter, and highlights the difficulty of cloning beers. I'm happiest randomly putting my own recipes together, and this is one of the very best things about brewing at home.

It's all gone

Last night I sadly emptied the barrel of a golden ale I brewed on St. Stephen's Day. I have got in the habit of putting half a brew in a 10 litre pressure barrel, and bottling the remainder. This provides me with a nice sized barrel that sits in my beer fridge at a tasty 12 degrees C. I was particularly happy with this ale not only because it tasted great but also because it looked the business too. It is without doubt the best looking beer I have produced, and so happy am I with the way it looks I allow it to grace the left hand side of my blog.

When I put the recipe together for this beer I anticipated a golden colour having used only pale malt and cara pils. However I expected all my efforts to be scuppered by my choice of yeast. I opted for US 05 along with oodles of cascade in the hope of producing an American type pale ale, but was aware in the back of mind that US 05 really doesn't like flocculating all that much and it could be quite some time before the beer achieved the golden clarity I hoped for, if it achieved it at all, because chill haze was another concern. Anyway, everything came together and the result was a gloriously deep golden brew with zingy citrus notes and strong malt profile. It's gone now save for a few bottles, but I think I'll venture down the route of assertive golden ales again not only because they look so tasty, but also because the commercial offerings of golden ale are so damn listless.

During the summer I received delivery of the CAMRA Club's beer selection only to discover is was awash with bland and gassy golden ales. I imagine they were a reflection of British brewers attempting to grab some of the lager market with lighter beers. I don't want to be quick to criticise because getting a foothold in any beer market for microbreweries is tough, so they might have no choice in the matter. I can't say I won't buy another commercial golden ale because any new craft beer turning up on the Irish market is a wonderful thing, and if I see something interesting in the off license I will buy it just to have the exciting experience of tasting a new beer.