An important part of WIB since its inception has been our homebrewing community. We never cease to be amazed by the creativity, talent and sometimes utterly bizarre creations they come up with, using the ingredients from our shelves. We've often said we wish we could share the brews that make it to our monthly homebrew club with the rest of the world, so now we are!
These recipes are from April 2023.
Dale’s becoming an almost ever present on these blogs and he’s done it again with this bitter recipe.
Bitter
Bitter recipe. A simple one...
Batch Volume - 23L Batch
16.73L Mash Water
12.79L Sparge Water
30 Min Boil
3.6KG Maris Otter (I actually ended up subbing about a kg of Lager Malt (Crisp) as i ran out of MO)
180g Extra Dark Crystal
Hops:
Endeavour 30mins 20g
Endeavour 15 mins 20g
Endeavour 3 mins 60g
Yeast:
I took the dregs of a bottle of Fullers 1845 and built up a starter using DME. Starting small 20g/200ml and building up once there was life. Total around 100g/1litre (cooling and discarding liquid along the way) then throw into the fermenter with the wort, 18 degrees for a week, little rise for a diacytyl rest and then a nice bit of bottle conditioning...
It was spot on, very happy with it!
………………………………………………………………………………………………
Doug brewed a Blueberry Gose, which went down a storm at homebrew club - check it out!
Blueberry Lewy Sour
I'm a big fan of fruit from Lewisham Market so decided to brew up three different fruit sours from the same base beer to get a bit of variety. After browsing the available fruit I decided to pick up figs, plums and blueberries. The fig beer turned out a bit strange, I think it might have been better to scoop out the insides rather than add whole fruit. The plum tasted better, but I pasturised the plum which made the end beer hazy (I've now bought some Pectinase). The blueberry though was fantastic - whatever strange market forces drive Lewisham market, it nearly always has buckets of very cheap blueberries.
For the base beer
OG:1.041
FG: 1.012
Alc: 5.1%
Mash
Liquor 10 litres plus two campden tablets in advance
Pale malt: 2.53kg
Torrified wheat: 1.32kg
Malted oats: 250g
For the boil
Topped up to 27 litres and boiled for 1hr 15
Tettnanger Hop: 5g at start of boil
Protofloc tablet: for last 15 minutes
Coriander seeds: 15g for last 10 minutes
Fermentation
Cooled the wort down and added a sachet of Philly Sour yeast
11 days later I split the beer into three buckets. To 6 litres of beer I added 1.579kg of pureed and pasteurised blueberries (263g per litre).
I'd lacto-fermented a kilner jar of blueberries a few weeks before to eat. To do this you weigh the blueberries and add 2% of their weight in salt. The salt draws liquid out of the fruit and stops anything except for lactobacillus growing on the fruit - the lactobacillus turns the sugars into lactic acid. They are nicer than they sound on yogurt. After finishing the blueberries I had 53g of salty lacto blueberry liquid which I added to the fermenter.
I also added 6g of salt, to taste (which was sort of guesswork as you are tasting warm, flat sour beer). My recipe suggested 20g for 23 litres of beer, so about a gram a litre.
Fermented the newly fruited beer for two weeks and bottled it.
It was it was tricky siphoning out the beer from the puree and the pellicle that had grown on the beer, so I made an improvised filter by cable tying a stainless steel scourer around the end of the siphon.
......................................................................................................................................The challenge for the month was ‘Resurrection’ - rebrew one of your old favourite brews. Martin brought in a Hob Nob Stout, here’s the recipe!
Hob Nob Stout
Based on a very early home recipe of mine which used Milk Chocolate Hob Nobs to make an Chocolate Oatmeal Stout.
This time round 1 262g packet was added to a mash of.... Whoops I wrote over my spread sheet with my next beer.
The original malt bill though was
in kg
1.27 Maris Otter
0.26 Rye
0.1 Crystal 100
0.1 Roast Barely
0.21 Chocolate Malt
and Milk Chocolate Hob Nobs
Mashed High and collecting 14l of sweet wort
In the Kettle
60 mins 20g Admiral
5 mins Bramling Cross and East Kent Goldings both 5g
Fermented with Volden house yeast.
The remake while using fewer ingredients and Nottingham yeast did not have the fullness of the original. Did the milk solids in the Milk Hob Nobs have something to play?
………………………………………………………………………………………
waterintobeer homebrew club takes place on the first Sunday of every month, starting at 2pm.