Fortsätt till huvudinnehåll

Recipe for English-style light ale


EXTRA BITTER LIGHT ALE
A classic English pale ale with a heavy hop content. Quantities are for 10 litres thus this has 2.5 times the normal hops. If you have brewed beer before these instructions give you enough information to give you a drinkable beer at the first attempt. If not, then research the subject more deeply if you do not want to be disappointed. If you want an even more bitter flavour then you might replace hops (A) with a high-alpha type such as Galaxy.

         1500 g    crushed malt grain
  200 g    crystal malt grain
    50 g    hops (Goldings A)
    25 g    hops (Goldings B)
    10 g    hops (Goldings C)
    10 g    hops (Goldings D)
      5 g    hops (Goldings E)

2 tsp gypsum
Copper finings (Irish moss)

PREPARE YEAST STARTER
Mix yeast with dilute malt solution and leave in warm place. If no activity after 3 hours add extra dried yeast pellets.

PREPARE COPPER FININGS
Boil seaweed gently until it becomes a jelly.

PREPARE ICE COOLANT
Fill bucket with cold water and place in freezer

THE MASH PROCESS
Fill large pan with water sufficient to cover malt grains (do not add malt grains yet). Add gypsum and heat to 60°C. Remove from heat and add malt grains. Temperature should be 55°C.Then slowly warm to 65°C and remove from heat
Leave for 2 hours. Add boiling water until temperature is 67°C.Leave for a further 20 minutes, then bring temperature to 75°C to terminate the mash process. Leave for 10 minutes.

Prepare boiling water for sparging

Put grain residue in strainer and arrange to make a saucer-shaped filter bed. Then pour hot liquid through and collect the wort in a bucket.
Put the grain residue back in the mash pan, pour hot water on and re-filter. Repeat (3 or 4 times) until the filtrate is no longer sweet. Alternatively, use a boiling pan with a tap and a perforated false bottom made for the purpose.

BOILING THE WORT
Place the liquid into 11 L boiling pan (or boil down until the volume is sufficiently reduced). When volume is reduced to less than 8 litres, add hops A. Boil for a further 45 minutes.

Add copper finings and hops B and boil for a further 15 minutes, then hops C and boil for a further one minute, then and transfer to bucket.
Cool quickly by adding ice prepared previously.

When cool, siphon into fermentation vessel leaving residue behind. This should be done in such a way as to make as much splash as possible to get air into the wort, to enable the yeast to work effectively. Make up to 10 litres.

FERMENTATION AND CONDITIONING
The fermentation vessel should be placed in the room where the fermentation will take place. If required, fit heating band round bucket (or aquarium heater) and plug in to electricity supply. Temperature must be at least 15°C and preferably less than 25°C

Check SG with hydrometer. It should be around 1.035, if lower, add 300g - 500g sugar. Add hops D in a net bag with something heavy in it so that it sinks to the bottom of the fermentation bucket.

When the temperature has fallen to 35°C the active yeast starter can be added “pitched” to the wort. A small quantity (a “splash”) of CocaCola can be added to provide necessary phosphorus for the fast-growing yeast. Check daily. Initial action will be very vigorous. When the yeast has formed a cake on the surface, skim off together with other debris, to prevent a bad flavour that can occur if the yeast cells start to decompose.

When activity has subsided, check the SG with hydrometer. It should be less than 1.020. Use syphon to transfer to a closed vessel fitted with an air lock, Add 50g sugar.

Add hops E in a small net bag. Allow to settle for at least 2 weeks, draw off into open container, then add gelatine finings, 60 g priming sugar, then transfer to container or bottles for final conditioning. The ale can be drunk about one month after bottling.

Kommentarer

Populära inlägg i den här bloggen

The dreadfulness of British governance

I wrote to my MP on two entirely separate issues recently. The first was to do with the replacement for the Inter City 125 train, which at £2.6 million per vehicle, is twice as expensive as it ought to be. The second concerned the benefits of a switch from business rate and Council Tax to a tax based on site values. In both cases, the replies were full of spurious, unsubstantiated assertions and completely flawed arguments. This is typical. You will not get an iota of sense from the government on any area of public policy at all - finance, economics, trade and employment, agriculture, housing, health, transport, energy. All junk. If you write to your MP you will invariably receive answers that are an insult to your intelligence, no matter what subject you are writing about. Of course they cannot understand statistics. They are innumerate. Whitehall is staffed with idiots with a high IQ. Look at their IT projects. And mind your purse, they will have that too.

How much more will the British tolerate?

The British are phlegmatic, tolerant and slow to rouse. Thus there was no great reaction after the terrorist attack in July 2005. The murder of Lee Rigby created a sense of outrage, but nothing more, since it appeared to be an isolated incident. Two serious incidents within a fortnight are another matter. Since the first major terrorist incident in 2001, authority has tried to persuade the public that Islam is a religion of peace, that these were isolated events, or the actions of deranged "lone wolves", having nothing to do with Islam, or to reassure that the chances of being killed in a terrorist attack were infinitesimally small. These assurances are are beginning to wear thin. They no longer convince. If government does not act effectively, people will take the law into their own hands. What, however, would effective action look like? What sort of effective action would not amount to rough justice for a lot of innocent people? Given the difficulties of keeping large n...

Battery trains fool’s gold

A piece by the railway news video Green Signals recently reported the fast charging trials for battery operated electric trains on the West Ealing to Greenford branch, in west London. In a comment under the video, I described the project as technological overkill, bearing in mind that before dieselisation in the 1960s it was worked by the tiny steam locomotives of the Great Western 1400 class, a 1932 design based on an 1870s design. The money that has been spent on the experiment would have paid for a small fleet of the old things. Elsewhere in the comments, I was critical of the 800 series trains. This produced a response from the makers of the video, as follows. “I may be grasping at straws here but I am guessing you don't like 8xx series trains all that much and rather wish we still had Kings, Castles and (for the branches) 14xx's. Fair? ” My reply was as follows... Yes you are grasping at straws. The model for long distance stock is the class 180, which is a 23 metre veh...