My brew’s are getting more complex for 2 reasons. The first reason is that I’m building on my skills and enjoying learning the new processes. The second is that so far the the more complex the beer making process the better it’s tasted. And so with my latest brew I’ve added a few extra steps.
Today’s brew is someone else’s recipe that I found on an old school site reminiscent of the old geocities sites but that doesn’t mean it’ll be bad. They called it “Hobgoblin at Hanging Rock” and it was a variation on the Hobgoblin Ruby Ale made by Wychwood brewery in the the UK.
The tasting notes from Wychwood are “a delicious chocolate toffee malt flavour, balanced with a rounded moderate bitterness and an overall fruity, mischievous character“. Sounds excellent.
The recipe I used is:
- 1 can Coopers Draught
- 1kg Light Dried Malt (that’s a lot of malt so it’s going to be a dark beer with a strong toffee flavour)
- 300g dextrose
- 100g crystal malt (first time i’ve used grain)
- 50g chocolate malt (guessing this gives it the chocolate flavour)
- 20g cascade hops @ 30min
- 12g fuggles hops @ 5min and left in the fermenter. (this will give it the overall fruity flavour)
So the 2 new parts to this are the use of grain and cooling it down.
Using the grain is just a small extra step to boil up some water and steep the grain for 20 – 30min. Then strain that out and put in on the 60min boil with the malt, extract, dextrose and hops.
Cooling it down – the wort (the malt / extract mixture) is vulnerable to wild yeast that’ll turn it bad until you can get your brewers yeast in and it starts to produce alcohol. I’ve got a good 10l of wort that’s just been boiling for 60min and remember the sugar content of this is high so it’s like a big pot of liquid toffee and all it’s latent heat. So to protect it I want to cool it fast, down to at least 32C, so I can “pitch” my yeast in. Some people have special coolers, some people pre-cool a stack of water to top up the wort to 23L, other’s use a bath….which is what i did. Picked up my entire pot and stuck it in the bath with lots of cool water. Dropped the temp down to 50C quite quickly and topping it up with normal water brought it down to 24C – fine for pitching my yeast.
It’s now in the fermenter for the yeast to do it’s thing, next update on this will be about 4 weeks away.
As with most things in my life, the more I know the more questions I have. And from this experience I have 2 main Q’s.
What gives beer the bitterness? I like a bitter beer and I’m sure it’s something to do with the hops and perhaps the grains. I’ll do some research on this and let you know.
However the BIG question I have is what is the etiquette on beer names. I’ve used someone else recipe so should my beer be called the same? I’d have to vary it to my tastes before I can change the name right? What do you think?
Geek, Garden and Cook 