Home Brew Forum

Tonight I'm attempting to make a hoppy mild with plenty of malt layers.

I'm using a selection of speciality malts and I'm aroma hopping with a healthy chunk of East Kent Goldings. The name Gardeners' Mild come from the fact that the copper Fuggles are my own home grown hops fresh from the freezer! I've estimated around 4%AA for those, but I've bittered slightly on the high side in case they are lower.

The mash is on, so here's the gen - would love your comments (and company) when I check the forum during the evening!


Gardeners' Mild

Grain Bill
-2.7Kg MO Pale Malt (70%)
-400g Munich Malt (10.5%
-200g Crystal Malt (5.2%)
-200g Wheat Malt (5.2%)
-180g Chocolate Malt (4.7%)
-170g Roasted Barley (4.4%)

Mash at 66 degrees for 90 mins (10.5L)
Sparge at 75 degrees (26L or so)

Hops
-Fuggles 45g 90mins (4% AA)
-East Kent Goldings 30g 15mins (+ Protofloc)
-East Kent Goldings 30g Flameout

Yeast
-Safale S-04 (pretty much all I have)

Mmmm. Looks tasty. EKG and Fuggles should be tasty.

I'm still a novice at the grain brewing, but I'd say you'll get exactly what your after, flippin gorgeous,

Sparging now, through the tun manifold for the first time with this one. Seems to be going well, and looks like black gold!

Looking forward to getting my own hops in there - very satisfying!

Sounds lovely. Going to look more like a porter or stout than a mild though?

Your recipe also reminds me to buy some more Munich malt....I'm sure it will come in useful for something.

It's a bit complex for a mild, but it's not strong enough for a porter.
Let's bill it as a ww2 mild.

More like a porter, you think? I've tried to keep the strength down, but if you mean because I've made it rather dark, yes, a last minute decision to swap out some pale malt for chocolate is probably the cause. I wanted it to be very dark, and when I ran my recipe through Beersmith I wasn't getting the EBC value I wanted, so I borrowed 180g of Chocolate off my friend who runs a local micro.

Is there any particular rule that would qualify this beer as a mild, porter or stout? My aim was to go for a 3.8%ish complex dark beer like Dark Star's Over the Moon, which is generally regarded as a mild but is a bit strong and hoppy to be typical of the style.

I don't know much about styles myself..... I just brew what I think will taste good.

My limited experience of roasted barley and chocolate malt is that they'll make it very dark indeed......and my limited experience of drinking milds, is that they aren't black, but porters are.

Mind you, I brewed a lager/ale crossbreed the other day and despite being neither one thing nor another, it tasted great and was highly acclaimed by all who drank it.

Anyway....sod the style critique. How's the brew coming along?

Well the mash and sparge all went very smoothly. Doing the returns was a bit weird because I've never brewed a beer as dark as this, so I simply did six litres in jugs and rinsed the grit each time rather than go by clarity.

Sparging was pretty effective. I usually batch sparge in two equal volumes, but this time I used the manifold in my coolbox mashtun lid and let about 27L flow into the tun slowly while it matched the flow coming out the other end. I'd always resisted this most traditional way of doing things, but actually it worked really efficiently and I think it was quicker than my two-step batching because I didn't need to do all those runnings at each stage.

Anyway, I got 32L in the boiler as planned, and it got up to temperature quickly as I had remembered to put the boiler on after the mash drainings for once. I put the Fuggles from the garden in which was really cool - smashing great flowers once they hit the water.

I'm only 35 minutes or so into the boil, so another 40 before the first aromas go in with the Protofloc and the cooler. Sorted the hosepipes out in the meantime, anyway, and I'm drinking an old bottled Fixby Gold with Styrian from a while back - the last one I'd hidden away. After this it's draft AG Bitter & Twisted.

All good then, thanks - nothing like late night brew. And when I'm at the pooter, last Thursday's Pion Brew is gurgling behind me!

Some very poor photos taken in my steamy dark garage, in case you're interested in the less shiny side of homebrewing...

This is the mash with 10.5L liquer. First dark mash for me.


First runnings. Black as you like. I took six litres of runnings to be sure.


Returning to coolbox mashtun with sophisticated foil thingymajig.


Time to drain the mash.


Mash drained and ready for sparging.


Looks dreadful this picture, put its an HLT with 27L of hot liquer going through the lid of the coolbox mashtun. There's a sparge manifold on the underneath which I trusted to do the business for me for the first time. I adjusted this tap and the out tap so that it just did its thing as slowly as I could bear. Remarkably it ran without a hitch. Who'da thunk it?


Boiling point for the 32L sweet wort.


In go the Fuggles from my garden. Bless 'em!


I always have a pint or three at this point. Tonight it was the last precious bottle of Fixby Styrian Gold from the shed, gathering dust just for this moment, followed by B&T on draught.


First East Kent Goldings aroma hops in; a few IBUs too at 15 minutes. Protofloc aswell- phew, remembered.


More EKG at flame out.


Chilling.


Into the FV at 22 degrees.


Very pleased there was no clogging and I managed to get 21L at the required 1.040, which will do just fine for a Corni and a couple of bottles.


Looked like a giant pint of Guinness after adding 24g Safale S-04 and whipping it up a storm!


Safely indoors to ferment. Looks really odd next to the Pioneer golden ale I made on Thursday. These flash pictures are really poor, but the contrast is more pale yellow and black than anything. Can't wait to see this one start bubbling like the other one is!

Nice job! Looks good to me.

How do you do your bottle labels BTW?

I hear you on the gloomy garage brewery thing.....and I am going to get relegated from kitchen to garage fairly soon. I've got plenty of space in the garage though, and with a bit of forethought, should be able to set up a pretty nice brewery.



The workbench at the back is temporary for now, but I plan to make it permanent, and turn the space below (or part of it) into temp controlled fermeting/lagering space. the main problem is that there is no water in the garage (and no way of getting it in permanently without digging up the drive), so I think I will plumb to the outside of the garage, then just drag a hose across the driveway when I need to brew. I also want to fit a metal sink into the worktop at one side, and run the drain through the wall into the field behind.

Plenty of space there.

I don't have water or a sink either, but I run hoses for cooling from the outside tap, and use a 5L spouted jug for moving water about.

The gloom comes from the fact the strip light currently doesn't work, and that when the air outside is cold like last night, the boiling water steam creates a general dew point around the place, so by midnight it's like brewing in some sort of subterranean grotto

Still, it all seemed to work!

Nice scope!

I'm into astronomy too.

adm wrote:Nice job! Looks good to me.

How do you do your bottle labels BTW?

For those bottles I used the Says-It Official Seal Generator, which is free, flexible and a laugh to tinker around with. I then just printed them out on normal printer paper, about eight to a sheet and stuck them on to bottles with Pritt (I've also used milk but Pritt worked better for me). If you crate your bottles it's a good idea to stick mini versions of the seals on the top of your bottles too, just 'cos it's nice and easy to spot the brews you're after.

ChrisG wrote:Nice scope!

I'm into astronomy too.

Thanks!

Sadly, it doesn't get out too much at the momet as it's a right pain to move and set up. however - I just ordered a ScopeBuggy from the US, so once that arrives I can leave it permanently set up on that and just roll it out on a whim! I can't wait - as the nights are drawing in....

Here's some pics (kind of repetitive.....just Saturn and Mars):
astroclicky

And here's a ScopeBuggy:
buggyclicky