If you haven’t read Ron Pattinson’s “Shut up about Barclay Perkins” blog or leafed through a copy of his recent book The Home Brewer’s Guide to Vintage Beer, you’re missing out, especially if you like British beer.  The book is crammed full of recipes for historic British ales, painstakingly recreated from actual brewing records.  It’s a gem, and a must-have addition to your British real ale library along with Graham Wheeler’s Brew Your Own British Real Ale and Dave Line’s Brew Beers Like Those You Buy.  We’ve had Vintage Beer in our library for a while, just looking for an excuse to brew something from it.  Given the cooler weather and leaves and pumpkins and stuff, we thought a porter would be perfect.

The Recipe

Name: 1867 Barclay Perkins EI
Batch size: 5 gallons
Expected OG: 1.061 (70% efficiency)
Expected FG: 1.019
Expected IBU: 85
Mash: 90m @ 152°F

 8.5 lbs Munton's Maris Otter
2.25 lbs Munton's Crystal 60L
   2 lbs Brown malt
   8 oz  Black malt

   2 oz  Fuggles       5.7%AA @ 90m
   1 oz  Kent Goldings 6.5%AA @ 60m
   1 oz  Fuggles       5.3%AA @ 60m
   1 oz  Fuggles leaf  4.9%AA @ hopback
  
1 pack Safale S-04 Yeast (rehydrated)

The original recipe specified Goldings all the way through, but we had few Goldings and many Fuggles.  The hopback addition is also not in the original recipe, but when you’ve got bling you have to use it or you loose a lot of cred with the cool kids.

Note the use of brown malt, which is a rarity these days in commercial brews, supplanted by much more efficient pale malts with small amounts of black malt for color.  Only Fuller’s still uses brown malt in quantity for their London Porter.  But with the rise of craft brewing you can find brown malt just about anywhere.

Also note the higher percentage of Crystal 60L compared to most other recipes you might have seen.  Crystal malts contain more unfermentable sugars than base malts like 2-row, Maris Otter, and Pilsner malt.  Furthermore, higher mash temps like this recipe specifies favor less fermentable sugars during the mash and thus contribute mouth-feel to the finished beer.  So we expect this porter to be fuller-bodied and sweeter than most other English beers we’ve brewed.

The Brew

Our mash efficiency was good, resulting in a much stronger pre-boil wort (8 gallons @ 12° Plato) than we expected.  But our boiloff estimate was too low, resulting in less-but-stronger wort at the end of the boil (4.5 gallons @ 18° Plato).  Ideally we would have diluted the initial wort, boiled off the same amount, and ended up right on the money.

One reason our mash efficiency was better was that we flipped around the worn washers in our Chugger pump heads.  Since they’re almost 18 months old, and washers do wear down, the large washer at the rear of the pump head against which the impeller rides had developed a concave appearance.

This caused the impellers to rub against the rear of the pump head when the output flow was restricted, which is exactly what want when you’re sparging.  Our previous two brews suffered efficiency because our sparge rate was too high, caused by opening the pump outputs more to prevent screeching due to the worn washers.  We’re trying to track down replacements, but apparently it’s hard.  Do other brewers just not run their pumps as much as we do?  In any case, we’re glad to have found out what the issue was, and fix it for at least a couple more brews.

On a side note, we’re having trouble hitting our mash temps using the Brewer’s Friend strike calculator, probably because our mash tun is a 25 gallon stainless kettle that we’re not pre-heating at all.  So all that strike water hits cold steel and chills down pretty fast.  In the future we’ll start raising our strike water temperature in an attempt to more accurately hit mash targets, which is all part of dialing your system in.

We kegged 4.5 gallons of 1.074 SG wort pumped through our hopback, and fermented at 67°F for two weeks, ending up with 1.026 SG beer for an ABV of 6.3% ABV.  That’s a much higher finishing gravity and lower ABV than we expected, which could be due to the high percentage of Crystal 60L malt.

What’s Next?

How should we use up the rest of our Maris Otter?  We’d love to brew a “stock ale” from The Home Brewer’s Guide to Vintage Beer so maybe we’ll try making our own invert sugar, which most of these recipes seem to require.  Till then!

After the previous batch ended up on the floor of the freezer, we re-brewed the Use-it-up Stout last month.  This time we’ll call it English Stout, because we had used up all the old Maris Otter malt and had to buy more.  Now that we’ve been able to sample all five gallons we think it turned out very well.

This time we also entered it in a local homebrew competition in the American Stout category (13E) and it received a mediocre score.  We believe this was for three reasons:

1. It was brewed about 25 days before the competition and did not have sufficient time to carbonate correctly, despite having been shaken at 30psi and then left at 16psi @ 40F for a day or two.  When bottled for competition the beer was almost flat.  Unfortunately, a week later it was correctly carbonated.
2. The beer is best after about 4 to 5 weeks of aging, so the beer we sent to the competition was still too green and the flavors had not mellowed enough.
3. American Stout was probably the wrong category for this beer, and it was docked points for not being to style.  Unfortunately, we’re not sure what category it does belong in, but re-reading the style guidelines, it may fit better in the Foreign Extra Stout category.  We’re not sure why we didn’t pick that category in the first place.

So if you’re going to enter a competition, do your research and pick the right category.  Also, know when your beer is at its prime, and make that the time when the judges crack the bottle open.

Continuing the fine tradition of using stuff up, our next attempt at disposing of the year-old Maris Otter and British hops is a stout.

Name: Stout
Batch size: 5 gallons
Expected OG: 1.062
Expected FG: 1.016
Mash: 90m @ 152F at 1.3 qt/lb

  9.25 lbs Muntons Maris Otter 3L
  1.0  lb  Briess Chocolate 350L
   12  oz  Muntons Medium Crystal 60L
   12  oz  Muntons Dark Crystal 150L
    6  oz  Briess Black Malt 500L  
    6  oz  Torrefied Wheat

1 oz Challenger    8.7% AA @ 60m
1 oz Fuggles       5.7% AA @ 15m
1 oz Challenger    8.7% AA @ 10m
Whirlfloc + yeast nutrient @ 10m
1 oz Fuggles       5.7% AA @  5m

1 pack Safale S-04 Yeast

The Maris Otter, VIctory, and C60 are the oldest malt of the bunch, bought at the same time as all the hops in March 2013.

The Hose

A burst water hose provided the entertainment for the day.  When building our setup we used a two-foot section of silicone high-temp hose (the same as we use between our kettles) from the wall-mounted water hookup to the cartridge filter mounted on our brewing bench.  Hey, we already had it, so why not?

Unfortunately, standard silicone hose that home-brewers use has a max working pressure of about 10PSI.  Most houses have a pressure of 40 – 60 PSI, so clearly this wasn’t going to work for long.  A loud BANG followed by the sound of gushing water first scared the crap out of us, then horrified us as we scrambled to shut off the water and mop up the floor.  The hose broke into three sections, with the center section burst right down the middle.

Carbon filters remove chlorine well, but only remove chloramine effectively when the flow rate is around 1 gallon per minute or less.  We had drilled a 1/16″ hole in a quarter and placed this into the camlock which is hard-plumbed to our water supply, which reduces the flow rate.  We thought it would also reduce the pressure in the hose, but apparently it takes a lot of pressure to push water through a carbon cartridge filter, at least more than silicone hose can take.

So we’ll be re-working our water supply to use high-pressure food-grade PVC hose from the wall hookup to the filter, since we don’t really want to clean up all that water again.

The Brew

With the fun all over, we lost a few degrees between the HLT and the mash tun when transferring the strike water, which we’ll have to compensate for in the future.  Instead of mashing at 152F, like we intended, the mash stayed around 148F.  But like we mentioned before, since the heat exchanger in the HLT was at 152F, some conversion still happens at the right temperature even if the mash is a bit low.

pH settled right on target around 5.3, from the strike water’s original pH of 7.0.  Since the recipe uses a fairly high percentage of dark grains, it’s not surprising the mash pH dropped this low.

Continuing a tradition, we batch sparged for a third time.  For the first batch we ended up with 5.25 gallons at 13.5 Plato (1.055).  We added another 4 gallons of 152F water and recirculated for a few minutes, and then drew off 4.5 gallons at 5.5 Plato (1.022) for the second batch.  Combining the entire first batch and 2.25 gallons of the second batch gave us 7.5 gallons of 10.5 Plato (1.042) wort to start the boil.

After the boil, we used our new whirlpool arm to circulate wort from the boil kettle through the pump, to the counterflow chiller, and back to the kettle.  We then drained the boil kettle directly into a keg which we oxygenated and then pitched the packet of S-04 without rehydrating. This procedure does increase the risk of infection, since chilled wort is in contact with more surfaces (boil kettle, pump, chiller, hoses) than our usual direct-to-fermenter procedure.

Our whirlpool produced a somewhat slower whirlpool than we were hoping, but it did have the desired effect.  All the trub (hop bits, grain bits, hot break, and cold break) concentrates in the middle due to the magic of physics. We then drain clear wort from the side, using a 90 degree side pickup, leaving the junk in the middle.

In the end, we got 5 gallons of 14 Plato (1.060) wort into the fermenter, about what we expected.  Thankfully we put the keg into a spare plastic dishpan, since we woke up the next morning to foam and splatter out the airlock, despite using Fermcap S.  Didn’t loose much beer, but next time we’ll just put less wort in the keg.

We bought hops and malt in bulk last year, thinking we’d brew more than we have.  Well, that’s not true, we thought we’d brew more British beer over the last 12 months.  But we didn’t, and now we need to use it up.

What better way to use British malt than brew a British beer?

Name: ESB
Batch size: 5 gallons
Expected OG: 1.055
Expected FG: 1.014
Mash: 90m @ 151F at 1.3 qt/lb

  9 lbs Muntons Maris Otter 3L
  1 lb  Briess Victory 28L
  6 oz  Muntons Medium Crystal 60L
  6 oz  UK Crystal 150L

1 oz Challenger    8.7% AA @ 90m
1 oz Kent Goldings 5.5% AA @ 15m
1 oz Kent Goldings 5.5% AA @  5m
Whirlfloc + yeast nutrient @ 10m

1 pack Wyeast 1469 West Yorkshire

The only ingredients that are “fresh” are the yeast and the Crystal 150L.  Not that older ingredients will make bad beer, but obviously the fresher the ingredients, the better the beer will be.  But don’t get us wrong, we just like beer so we’ll drink it anyway.

The Brew

We mashed at 151F for 90 minutes, and then batch sparged again (mostly to refine our process).  The first batch yielded a respectable 5 gallons @ 13P (1.053).  Next we added another 5 gallons of 150F water, recirculated for 15 minutes, and drained off 4 gallons @ 5.25P (1.021).  We combined the entire first batch and 3 gallons of the second batch in the boil kettle, for a total of 8 gallons @ 10P (1.040).  We thought the low gravity required a volume reduction, so after 30 minutes of boil-off, the real boil started with 7.5 gallons @ 11.25P (1.045).

At the end of the 90 minute boil we got a bit less than 5 gallons at a much higher gravity than we expected: 1.068 OG.  What happened?  It turns out these numbers are completely expected.  We simply started with too little wort; instead of boiling off a half-gallon, we should have begun with all 8 gallons of 10P (1.040) wort and boiled down to 5.5 gallons over the 90 minute boil (at a 1.67 g/hr boil-off rate) to achieve the target gravity of 1.055.  Oh well.

We also over-boiled our oxygenation stone when cleaning and sanitizing it, which broke the stone away from the MFL fitting that connects the stone to the oxygen hose.  So we used the tried-and-true pour method of oxygenation, dumping the cooled wort from the keg into a sanitized bucket, and then back into the keg through a funnel.  The funnel provided a bigger pour target and a more concentrated stream into the keg, which produce quite a bit of foam and thus oxygenation.  So much so that it foamed out of the keg and onto the floor.  Oops.

The Beer

After 18 days of fermentation between 59 degrees (night) and 65 degrees (day) we racked to a secondary keg.  Oddly, flocculation was awful.  Final gravity ended up at 1.014 for a healthy 7% ABV, which like the OG, was way over what we expected.  That’s 78% apparent attenuation, which is quite high for this yeast.  Maybe the yeast nutrient we added or good aeration helped the yeast be extra-efficient?

A month after brew day, the beer was clear and drinkable.  It lacked some body due to the lower mash temperature (151F) and low percentage (7%) of crystal malt.  Next time, we’ll try mashing a bit higher (153F) and if that doesn’t work well enough, we’ll up the crystal to 10% or 12% of the grain bill.  The higher alcohol content caused an unwelcome bite versus the IBUs (~50), which created a slightly off-balance final product.  Correctly managing the boil gravity will solve that problem next time.

But it looks good, and tastes OK, and we like beer.  We’ll drink it!