Category Archives: recipes

Recipe: 1912 St Austell Stout

Roger Ryman, head brewer at St Austell, kindly let us look at their historic brewing logs earlier this year. With help from Ron Pattinson, frequent reference to his blog and to the book he wrote with Kristen England, The 1909 Style Guide, we think we’ve just about managed to make sense of some of the earliest recipes (MS Word file).

So, here’s the recipe we’ll be using later this week. Brewers and home brewers — what do you think?

SPECIFICATIONS
Dead black
Original gravity (OG): 1059
c.55 international bitterness units (IBUs)

INGREDIENTS
4400g English pale malt
630g brown malt
630g black malt
420g invert sugar No 2
210g caramel (aka E150 colouring, aka ammonia caramel, aka ‘browning’)
88g East Kent Goldings hops at c.5.8% alpha acid
‘Burton’ yeast, e.g. White Labs WLP023

MASH grains at 66c/151F for one hour. Sparge in two batches of equal size, the first at 79c/175F; second 85c/185F.

BOIL for two hours. Add sugar No 2 and caramel at the start (120 mins). When the sugar is fully dissolved, add 65g of the hops (or c.70% of total). Add the remaining hops (18g, c.30% of total) at 90 mins (30 mins remaining).

COOL and FERMENT as per your usual procedure. (For added historical accuracy, though, you could try an open fermentation…)

Notes

1. In 1912, St Austell’s brewers were a bit slap-dash with their book-keeping: whole brew days are dismissed with a ‘ditto’ for the previous; key columns are left blank; and information is written in the wrong places, ignoring the printed boundaries. Like many breweries of the time, St Austell seemed to be terrified of industrial espionage, and so, even where information is provided, it’s in a rather cryptic format.
2. The biggest problem was the lack of information about the volume of liquid used at each stage but, after months of staring at it, we worked out that ’34′ under ‘B’ referred to the number of barrels in the boil.
3. We’ve gone with a Burton yeast because another recipe in the 1912 St Austell log says this:

Burton No 1 yeast note.
4. Post-WWI St Austell recipes call for, e.g., 70lbs of yeast cropped from an active fermentation. We can’t be any more precise than to suggest that a decent-sized starter would therefore be a good idea.
5. We’re guessing about the timing of hop additions based on other contemporary stout recipes. We’re also guessing at the variety, but St Austell used ‘Worcesters’ in many other recipes.
6. No finings: what would be the point in a beer this black?
7. We know it’s meant to have an OG of 1059 because of this helpful key:

Gravities list, 1912.

Eppingwalder Pils

eppingwalder

We’ve had a bit of success making lager in the past. As long as you don’t set your sights on recreating the clinical purity of the mass-produced products — if you’re happy with a bit of Czech or Franconian fruitiness — then it’s more than possible to come up with something decent in your kitchen at home, with only the wishy-washy English winter and a cluttered garage for cold-conditioning.

Our most recent effort was supposed to be a clone of Pilsner Urquell (pilsner malt, Urquell yeast, Saaz hops) but turned out to be a cloudier and a little sweeter. Drinking it in the sun, we were taken back instantly to the beer gardens and halls of Nuremberg, Wuerzburg, Bamberg, Augsburg and… well, you get the picture.  It was rough around the edges but very alive. We’re chuffed to bits and will be drinking it all summer, if we can make it last.

Mulled beer attempt 1

We followed the Wikihow advice for our first experiment, egg yolk and all. We took a bottle of London Pride, added spices, ginger, honey and warmed it up. We then added an egg yolk & sugar mixture.

The result looked like tea, smelled like mulled wine and tasted like a hot cross bun with hops. Drinkable, but would be better with a less hoppy beer.

Recipe and instructions for Belgian Witbier

Our wit sitting in the sun

Our wit sitting in the sun

When we wrote about our blackberry beer a week or so back, we mentioned that we made it using a witbier base. We thought we’d also share how we made the witbier.

We owe most of the recipe to Randy Mosher’s Radical Brewing — a truly inspirational homebrewing book, although not really one for beginners as it is rather erratically laid out at times. But we’re constantly using it for new ideas and it has been worth every penny.

We’ve had a couple of goes at this, refining the second recipe to make a beer that’s a little tarter and more to our tastes. We’re extremely pleased with the final result, which as you can see from the picture looks reasonably authentic. It’s very refreshing and drinkable, and wonderfully weak too — our second version was a mere 3.5% (more by accident than design).

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Pimp my stout

orange.jpgOur latest homebrew is nearing the end of primary fermentation. We’re aiming for a “chocolate orange stout” – not so much Terry’s chocolate orange, but more something bitter and rich with a hint of citrus. A bit like our impressions of Yeti Imperial Stout, which in turn reminded me of an 85%-cocoa-solids hot chocolate I had in Spain once. That’s what we’re going for. We’re not ambitious or anything.

Anyway, we’ve had a sneaky sample, and it’s already showing a lot of promise. We’re going to bottle some just as it is, but we’ve got some smaller carboys, so we could do a range of experiments with secondary fermentation. So if you’ve got any ideas for what to do next, whether based on experience or pure fantasy, let us know after the “jump”, where you’ll find the full recipe so far.

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Update on extract brew "Old Malty" – plus recipe!

We posted yesterday on our stuck fermentation problems, and how we’re trying an experimental batch with a kit to try and identify where in the process it’s all going wrong.

Obviously, having tried all-grain mashes, there was no way we were just going to follow the recipe – we had to tinker. Because we love the open-source ideal, here’s our recipe;

  • 2 cans of Muntons Gold – Old English Bitter (hopped extract)
  • 1lb carapils & 1 lb Munich malt, steeped in sub-boiling water for 20 minutes
  • 2lbs of light malt extract
  • Hops: 0.5 oz East Kent Goldings (5.6%) for 60 minutes (at boil), 0.5 oz East Kent Goldings (5.6%) for 20 minutes, 0.5 oz Cascades – 5 minutes
  • Gervins English ale yeast (sachet, re-hydrated)

Instructions follow after the jump.

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