This being Britain, even in the heights of summer we had autumn on our minds, so decided to settle upon an autumn ale. Well, not quite an autumn ale. After sampling a couple of darker wheat ales at the relative debacle that was the Reading beer festival back in May (a story for another time), Andrew and I settled upon having a crack at making one ourselves. A bit of Googling found a partial mash of this recipe from deepest Japan of all places, which looked like it would do.
So last weekend, the standard Ealing Heights brew crew of myself, Andrew and Sam (of ‘ounslow fame) gathered at our new (well, to us), flat along with brewing newbies Tim from Wales and Michael from Tokoroa (we try not to talk about that to be honest). Beforehand, I decided that we had to fill the monotonous hour(s) where the mash was steeping and the boil was boiling with something – so hit upon the idea of a ‘Brew-bq’. Naffly named I know, but certainly a hit with the punters.
This brew recipe looks to be a bit of a special one, as it involved about a pound of roasted oatmeal – Sainbury’s finest. We’ve used oatmeal before to great effect so we’re hoping for similar results this time around. I’ll spare you the boring bits of what we did and when, but the highlights were that we had some interesting logistics with sparging nearly 4 kgs of grain with a relative dearth of equipment, and that we gave the yeast an extra ‘push’ with half a kg of brewing sugar we had knocking around. OG was 1.060, which if it gets down towards the predicted FG of 1.014 (ish) we should have a nice beer 5.5% beer sometime in October.
The only slight wrinkle has been that while the yeast has been doing its thing for most of the week, it’s been the hottest few days of the summer. What that will mean for the beer, I have no idea. It may end up being called ‘Hot living room beer’ at this rate. But we’ll see.
What went well
- Combining a four hour brew with a barbecue. Meat and beer-making, yum!
What didn’t
- Sparging 4 kgs of grains – it’s very difficult to get all of the runnings over all of the grains without spilling some of either. We might have to look at some kind of siphoning process in the future.
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