Bath Ales Gem - Final with Brewery help

[phatboytall]

There are a few threads flying around on this, i've been contributing to most of them, but i thought I would start a new one to share the below that I recieved directly from the brewer.

I sent them an email praising their beer (I reckon its a fantastic malty Amber, only Purity UBU is similar) and asking if they could help with recreating a recipe. The brewer emailed back and after a few emails I was able to confirm the below :

Maris Otter 91%, Crystal 4%, Wheat 4%, Chocolate 1%.
Hops Bittering Challenger, Aroma Goldings to IBU 22-25
Yeast is a derivative of the Whitbread strain, so WLP007 English Dry Ale

Clearly a great amount of information from the brewery, I love it when they are happy share info like that, makes me want to buy their beer more!

Based on the above i've created this recipe, I hope to brew it at the wknd and will share the results back

Gem 23litres
4000g Maris Otter Pale
200g Crystal (120ECB)
200g Wheat
30g Chocolate (this is less than 1% but I reckon it should be enough to make it Amber)

20g Challenger (60mins)
30g Goldings (5mins)

Yeast I haven't got any Whitbred to hand so will have to use WLP002 Fullers or maybe some Ringwood brewery yeast, both similar by not as well attenuating as I understand

Est OG 1046


Any thoughts on that? Look like a good effort?

[boingy]

Looks good to me. My kinda beer.

Brew it, danno!

[Zapp Brannigan]

Freaky, I idly popped in to the recipes section to see if I could find any guidance on this one and here is all this info

This is a really first class ale, and great to see the brewers being so good to the HB community. Straight to the top of my "to brew list" .

[phatboytall]

Great to have you aboard Zapp!

I'm brewing it this wknd, I am planning to mash low at 64-65c and use the Ringwood yeast, but I reckon S04 would do a job. I discovered today thats based on an old Whitbred strain.

[Zapp Brannigan]

If it is one of the Whitbread strains then it will be Wy1098 or 1099, probably the latter as 1098 is too tart for this beer.

I'll probably do a brew with Nottingham and then get some 1099 on order for a revisit.

[phatboytall]

Brewed the above recipe at the wknd with a few tweaks due to what ingrediants I had to hand (i'm due a big homebrew order)

- I didn't have any Wheat Malt so went without, brewer said that was "purely for head retention" anyway.
- I didn't have any Challenger or Goldings so I used English Pioneer hops, adjusted accordingly to their 8%AA, no idea what these are like.
- The colour looked to light when I took my hydro sample with 2mins to go, so in a possibly rather stupid last minute decision I poured another 30grams of Chocolate malt into the boil to add some colour. Most of this got filtered out by my hopfilter, but I poured into the FV using a sieve and got a load more there. It seemed to darken it slightly, possibly still to light.

Other than that I hit gravity bang on and pitched my Ringwood yeast this morning (again another deviation from Bath Ales!)

All things considered it won't be very much like Bath Ales Gem at all!!! But I will brew properly next month, hopefully with the Bath Ales yeast, and will definately up the Chocloate Malt quantity to around 50g.

Anyone else tried this yet? I intend to keep rebrewing this one til I get it sorted.

[Zapp Brannigan]

I brewed this on Sunday. Here is the (25ltr, 72% efficiency) recipe I used. I messed up slightly and brewed to the bottle strength (4.8% rather than the cask at 4.1%, but hey ho):

5171g Pale malt
227g Crystal Malt
227g Wheat Malt
56g Chocolate Malt

24g 7.6AA Challenger @90
21g 5.7AA Golding @15
24g 5.7AA Golding @0

I used Nottingham.

I brought my alkalinity down to 45 using CRS and boosted my calcium to 220ppm with DLS.

Cant wait to see how it turns out.

[danwlx]

Let me know how this turns out as I'm brewing this in a couple of weeks!

I have the choice of wlp002 or nottingham, any thoughts on which is closer to the correct style?

Cheers

[Zapp Brannigan]

WLP-002 is the Fullers strain, so think malty, fruity with a fair whack of diacetyl. I think the recipe could be pretty interesting with it, but it will taste more like a Fullers beer (not that that's a bad thing).

[Zapp Brannigan]

I tried a sample of this today after a couple of weeks in the keg and it is excellent. I reckon using the ratios given and the right yeast (I used nottingham because I didnt have the right strain), you would be bang on.

[holley_dave]

Hi

Sorry to drag up an old post, but I fancy having a crack at this recipe and was wondering what gravity readings I should be looking for, or what other people got?

Cheers!

[phatboytall]

I think 1046 is your target, thats based on my chats with the brewer.

[holley_dave]

Many thanks. Much appreciated.