It may come as a surprise that as I have been brewing since 2009 and lived most of that time in San Diego, but I have never made a hoppy beer*. Living in San Diego, I had access to plethora of amazing IPAs, all as fresh as could be, so why would I need to make my own? I chose to direct my efforts as making tasty, sessionable malty beers like my beloved Gremlyn’s Mild. Recently I have gotten the urge to brew a hoppy beer, but I don’t want to brew a traditional IPA with loads of C-hops or late Simcoe/Amarillo additions. I chose instead to make a Golden Ale, which is modeled on the 2015 BJCP British Golden Ale guidelines, mostly by coincidence.
As the name implies, my Golden Ale will be a light, golden coloured beer. It’ll be mashed low, at 150F, using the big addition of Golden Naked Oats to provide some body and complexity to the taste. I’m using a hop burst like approach, with a short 35 min boil and first wort hopping. I want to really emphasize the English hops (EKG and Phoenix), and have a moderate bitterness, but not over the top. I’ve limited the bittering ratio to the 0.7 to 0.75 range. My hope is this will be somewhat of an English session IPA, if such a thing were to exist.
My mash profiles aren’t listed on the recipe pages, but I will also be attempting a shortened mash schedule. I’m planning to go for only 30 minutes. If I am successful, I’m hoping that I can implement a shorter mash and boil for all of my sub 1.050 beers. If it works well enough, I might even get adventurous and try it with the bigger beers. A recent experiment by Brulosophy corroborates what I have started hearing from some fellow home brewers: we’re only mashing and boiling for an hour plus because convention tells us to. If my conversion is complete after 30 minutes, why wait that whole extra 30 minutes for no reason? If I can achieve the same IBU and hop character with a 30 minute boil as a 60 minute boil, why waste 30 more minutes?
OK, this isn’t 100% true, but the only other time that comes close was very early in my brewing and it wasn’t very good; it wasn’t even that hoppy since I tried to be conservative – so I don’t count it!
Update: Tasting Notes