Vicky wants a golden ale, we’ve enjoyed this one before, and it’s a nice simple recipe that can use up mainly existing stocks. I did buy 2kg of Golden Promise, which was all the Malt Miller had left in stock, making the rest of the grain bill up with left over Bohemian Pilsener malt. Yeast is from the slurry saved from the previous Hobgoblin, WLP002.
Brewday details:
- Length: 27 litres
- OG: 1.038
- FG: 1.010
- ABV: 3.7%
BeerXml File: Golden Delicious
Golden Delicious
- Style: Standard/Ordinary Bitter
- Length: 25 litres
- Yeast: English Ale (White Labs WLP002)
- OG: 1.038
- FG: 1.010
- ABV: 3.6 %
- Colour: 6.2 EBC
- Bitterness: 25.1 IBUs
Fermentables:| Name | Colour | Amount (kg) | % |
|---|
| Pale Malt, Golden Promise (Thomas Fawcett) | 6 | 1.999 | 51 |
| Bohemian Pilsner (Weyermann) | 3 | 1.750 | 45 |
| Caster Sugar | 0 | 0.159 | 4 |
| Total | 3.910 | |
Hops:| Name | Alpha | Form | Amount (g) | Time (mins) |
|---|
| Challenger | 5.9 | Leaf | 33 | 90 |
| Bobek | 3.9 | Leaf | 10 | 10 |
Comments:
Alkalinity measured at 239 meq/L. Full water treatment, as I now have most of the salts that the calculator at Jim’s suggests, so that’s 44.1ml CRS, 10.8g gypsum, 2.2g calcium chloride, 3.8g Epsom salts, 1.2g common salt.
Mr. Malty is recommending 113ml of my yeast slurry, based on being harvested 2 weeks ago, and the default values for thickness of slurry and percentage of non-yeast material. Since it’s WLP002 it’s quite a thick slurry, but also not stratified into yeast and non-yeast, so I’m guessing that the recommendation will be about right. I will up it a bit as common wisdom is that it’s best to pitch big, but since I have the best part of a litre of slurry then that’s way more than I need and if I pitch that much apparently I’ll be overpitching and running the attendant risks of autolysis and so on (q.v. this interesting discussion).
Post boil I’m at 29 litres, again a little more than I want. I clearly need to adjust my boil-off rates in BeerSmith. However, I’m bang on the money at 1.038, so maybe I also need to up my efficiency.
Very pale and clear wort into the fermenter, quite a malty flavour in the trial jar – interesting to see how this one ferments out. In the end I added 200ml of slurry, the rest decanted into 2 StarSan’ed plastic litre bottles, which have gone back into the fridge. Not sure when I’ll next brew, but I’ll see how they’re looking (and smelling!) and maybe I’ll have another brew on the same beer. This slurry had maybe a slightly sharp note when I smelled it, but it didn’t appear to be infected, so I pitched it into the wort at around 23C, fermentation chamber set to 18C for a clean ferment.
2013-05-27: Kegged and bottled 14. Still a sharp smell, and maybe a bit of vinegar in the taste. How it settles down in the keg, but this one may be bad…
2013-08-08: Ended up tasting a lot better than I feared. Wasn’t infected (if it was, it was a very low level), and the sharpness faded with time. The result by the end of the keg (which is almost finished by now) was a rather drinkable beer – refreshing on a hot day. Bit of a relief…
