Recipes

If I have a pride and joy in my brewing, this recipe is it. I designed this recipe in my early days of home brewing and it marked a turning point in my understanding of how to design recipes and understand how ingredients affect the resulting flavour of a beer. I was visiting family in England in early 2011 and happened upon a pub/brewery in East Anglia; the pub is The Fur and Feather Inn and the brewery is called Woodfordes. I had their Mardler’s Mild from a gravity fed cask and loved it so much that I decided I needed to recreate that beer to drink at home. I was reading Ray Daniels’ book Designing Great Beers at the time and decided to put my new found knowledge to the test, so I sat down and came up with the recipe you see on this page. Barring very minor tweaks because I like numbers to be round-ish (convert to kg and the nonsense decimals below looks great), the recipe has not changed since the first time I wrote it and has served as a starting point for all my brown English beers. [Read more…]

This the recipe page for the biere de garde I brewed for an AABG Brewola event. We met on April 13th, 2018 to compare beers, you can read about that here. I’m fermented it all clean with WLP029, and then kegged half and put the other half in a carboy with Bootleg Biology’s Funk Weapon 3. I opted to start the fermentation out at 58F and kept it there about 5 days despite White Labs’ recommendation to keep it warmer. It worked very well at 58F, hitting 79% attenuation. [Read more…]

A while ago I became convinced that I could make any Belgian style beer with two grains and some sugar additions. I love a good Dubbel and figured that would really showcase the ability to attain the right flavour profile with a very simple recipe. After a few iterations I landed on the recipe below. I tried a little darker, using D-180 instead of D-45, and though it was good, it was a bit darker for what I thought it should be – more of a big quad without the rest of the quad characteristics. [Read more…]

Burton Ale from 2015 I wanted to create a high gravity beer that was special to me. I’d read about a mostly forgotten beer style in a book by Martyn Cornell called a Burton Ale, which seemed like the perfect thing to try. What I came up with is undoubtedly not a traditional Burton Ale, but my take on the style. I targeted the loosely defined style specs and to get to the gravity I wanted I decided to try a concentration boil. This recipe uses a 4 hour boil, intended to concentrate a standard strength wort into a high gravity wort and produce many complex flavours through Maillard reactions. Gravity and volume are tracked over time and hops are added when I determine 60 mins is left in the boil. I mash low to ensure fermentability of the high gravity wort. [Read more…]

An unconventional English-style bitter. This recipe is identical to my yearly winter warmer, the Burton Ale, with the exception of the hops and boil length. This beer is a standard 60 minute boil and there is a whirlpool hop addition at the end (which shows up as 5 min aroma addition on this page for some reason). The grain bill, including Golden Naked Oats and brown malt pushes this beer outside of a conventional bitter style beer, but like my Rye, Bitte the general concept stays within the bounds of a strong bitter. [Read more…]

A sample of the Ye Olde Vineale in a RatFest tasting glass. This is a recipe my brewing partner and I came up with for Arbor Brewing Company’s 2017 RatFest. You can read about the brew day here. You can read about the event and tasting notes here. [Read more…]

An English-style bitter with a portion of the grain bill made up of rye malt. You may have noticed that I rarely name my beers, yet this one has a name – sort of. I view this beer as an English style bitter, as it relies on Maris Otter, English hops, and English ale yeast as a big part of the profile, yet it is made with a healthy portion of rye malt in the grist. Bitte in German means please (in this context), and using it as a double entendre for Bitter is a nod to delicious roggenbiers that inspired the use of rye in this recipe. [Read more…]

Golden ale made with golden naked oats and English hops. At the time of posting this Golden Ale, this is my hoppiest beer ever. That’s kind of funny as it’s probably only just approaching American pale ale levels of hops. I experienced the craft beer scene in San Diego in the mid-late 00’s and IPAs were abound. What I had trouble finding in bars was anything with a focus on malt, or at least lacking a focus on hops. This was before Belgians and sours became hot styles, so when I started brewing in 2009 I turned my attention toward beers from my homeland: England. [Read more…]

This is a recipe I put together for a small barrel project. Two other home brewers from the AABG and I each brewed a batch and will contribute 5 gallons. Being the first batch through the barrel I expect it won’t spend more than 2-3 weeks in there. Recipe note: I always have a little more third runnings than I need which I usually discard, but for this beer I took about 1.25 gallons of it and boiled it down until it started to look a little syrupy. I added that to the whirlpooling kettle while I was cooling for a little flavour boost. [Read more…]

This is a recipe I created for a club competition, and what you see below is the original recipe scaled up to 11 gallons from the original 10 gallons (accounts for packaging losses better). I like this beer, though it was distinctly lacking any honey character and I think the info I’ll take from the experience is that it takes more than 4 lbs of honey in 10 gallons of beer to have a meaningful flavour impact. [Read more…]