Braggot Mead Ale hybrid

[simon12]

A friend has talked me into trying to make a mead ale cross I believe is known as braggot. I plan to use equal amounts of grain and honey using alot of crystal malt (likely 80% maris otter 20% crystal maybe a tiny amount of black) and mashing high to get the maximum sweetness as I think the honey will ferment out totally. I want to keep the hops low to allow the honey to come through to see ifs its a desirable flavour worth making again and targeting an ABV of 6.5-8%.
Questions are:
Will a bitterness of around 25 IBUs be OK for a beer this strong or do I need something else to balance the ABV
I normally use gervin GV12 is there any point in changing for this
Any recommendation on hops I have first gold, northdown, challenger & EKG
Any other comments or suggestions welcome
Cheers

[bochgoch]

In his book 'Radical Brewing' Randy Mosher has a Bronze Age Bragot that's pretty much 50:50 honey to malted wheat, with no hops, but the herbs bog myrtle and winter green added, then some liquid smoke(!) & cranberries added in the secondary... Perhaps a little more bronze age than you are aiming for!?

There's also an English Bragot, with just 10% honey with the rest malt and with cinnamon, ginger and pepper then minimal english hops.

I'm interested to see which way you go with this recipe, been thinking of doing something similar but undecided regarding quantities of honey and the use of herbs and spices...

[simon12]

My provisional 23L recipe is
2.3Kg Maris otter
200g Crystal malt
2.5Kg Honey (no idea what type yet) added end of boil
20g Northdown 60 mins
10g Northdown 10 mins
then bottled & primed with a little honey
According to beersmith this should come ot at 7.4% ABV and 25.7IBUs but strongly considering uping to 35-40 IBUs.
I don't want to use herbs or spices as if its not good I want to know it wasn't because of them.

[bochgoch]

The English recipe uses cinnamon, black or long pepper, chopped candied ginger, galingale & cloves added to the secondary so you could always split your batch and try on a small amount. I guess you'd add them in a muslin bag like just dry hoping.

[simon12]

I have all those except galingale (just ginger not candied) any idea on quantities?

[bochgoch]

Rule of thumb looks like 1g a litre except

[bochgoch]

...oops...
The last 2 which are more like 0.25g a litre

[simon12]

Thanks for that, it will be a few weeks until this brew is underway will see how it goes.

[bochgoch]

Please post back and let us know how it goes, I'm fancying doing something similar myself.

[simon12]

Will do.
Cheers

[simon12]

I finally got round to making this yesterday, final recipe was:
2.1Kg Pale malt
400g Crystal 150
25g northdown 1st wort
27g Wai-iti 10 min (left in my freezer for ages)
20g northdown 5 min
2.5Kg honey end of boil
Hit the target 1.057 SG. Fermenting away now.

[bochgoch]

Cool. What yeast did you use?

Are you going to split and add spices in the secondary to one part?

Had a sneaky taste? I guess it just tastes like malty honey early on...

[simon12]

Nottingham yeast. Not decided but very busy so likely not. Have not tasted yet.

[simon12]

Only just got round to bottling this yesterday gravity finished 1.002 but tasted very sweet still, definitely more of a mead than an ale. Primed with 100g sugar. Can't wait to see what its like conditioned.

[JamesF]

Missed this thread first time around. Sounds interesting. And certainly more so than how I first (mis)read the title -- "Maggot Bread Ale Hybrid".

James