There's one exception. A brewing log from the St. Stephen's brewery of Norwich. Why it ended up with the Chiswell Street stuff, I have no idea. But I'm not complaining. It's a good contrast with the London brewers I usually concentrate on. St. Stephen's was well away from the metropolis and operated on a much smaller scale (40 barrels a brew rather than 1,000).
St. Stephen's beer range was spartan, to say the least. X, XX, Porter and Table Beer. The recipes are equally unspectacular. Just one type of malt and one type of hops, apart from the Porter.
Time to pass you over to Kristen for the recipe details . . . .
St. Stephen's 1834 Porter | |||||||||
General info: A simple recipe from a simpler time. A very straightforward porter from a small little forgotten brewery. A very simple 3 ingredients let the entire character to this beer. Because of the time period no sugar was permitted n the grist. All malt. A copious amount of aged hops rounded out the entire brewing bill. This beer would have probably been considered an export stout in a later era as its quite big and has a very good dose of hops. | |||||||||
Beer Specifics | Recipe by percentages | ||||||||
Gravity (OG) | 1.066 | 72.6% English pale malt | 0% | ||||||
Gravity (FG) | 1.022 | 20.7% Brown malt | 0% | ||||||
ABV | 5.87% | 6.7% Black malt | 0% | ||||||
Apparent attenuation | 66.67% | 0% | |||||||
Real attenuation | 54.61% | ||||||||
IBU | 83.0 | Mash | 120min@156°F | 1.4qt/lb | |||||
SRM | 75.0 | 120min@68.9°C | 2.93L/kg | ||||||
EBC | 199.5 | ||||||||
Boil | 120 min | ||||||||
Homebrew @ 70% | Craft @ 80% | ||||||||
Grist | 5gal | 19L | 10bbl | 10hl | |||||
English pale malt | 9.07 | lb | 4.129 | kg | 491.9 | lb | 190.05 | kg | |
Brown malt | 2.59 | lb | 1.179 | kg | 140.54 | lb | 54.30 | kg | |
Black malt | 0.84 | lb | 0.382 | kg | 45.38 | lb | 17.53 | kg | |
lb | 0.000 | kg | lb | 0.00 | kg | ||||
lb | 0.000 | kg | lb | 0.00 | kg | ||||
lb | 0.000 | kg | lb | 0.00 | kg | ||||
oz | 0.000 | kg | lb | 0.00 | kg | ||||
677.82 | |||||||||
Hops | |||||||||
Fuggles 5.5% 120min | 2.92 | oz | 8278.2 | g | 181.22 | oz | 4.378 | kg | |
Fuggles 5.5% 30min | 1.44 | oz | 40.8 | g | 89.38 | oz | 2.159 | kg | |
Fermentation | 62°F /16.7°C | ||||||||
Yeast | Nottingham ale | ||||||||
WLP002 English Ale Yeast | |||||||||
Wyeast 1968 London ESB | |||||||||
Tasting Notes: Massively rich and chewy. Cocoa, burnt biscuits, graham crackers, coffee and carbonized sugars. Loads of raw grassy character with the mouth drying tannins to boot. Finishes thick but not sweet in the least. The dark acidic character of the malts really extend the finish that keeps going and going. | |||||||||
Ingredients and technique
Grist & such
Not an entire amount to say about this beer. Only three simple ingredients. Pale, brown and black malt. No sugar or anything else. Very similar to a lot of export stouts that came out later in 1850s and such.
Hops
All the hops were quite old and there were a massive amount of them. To get the real character of this beer the hops you used would have to had around 2.5% alpha acids. So if you can find any hop with this amount of AA’s I would give it a shot and recalculate what you need based on actual BU numbers. The kind doesn’t really matter as only the poundage was given. No dry hopping info was given but with this hop character I would think anything right around 2.0g/L would suffice nicely.
Mash & Boil
A moderate mash with a moderate time frame. Nothing fancy at all. The boil for the first gyle was only about 2 hours where the lower gravity second gyle was quite long at 4 hours. My thoughts are that they boiled until they got the gravity they wanted.
Fermentation, Conditioning & Serving
No fermentation temperature was given so if we keep it moderately low we’ll be able to hit our final gravity without much of a problem. Condition for 2 to 3 weeks should do the trick and right around 2 volumes of CO2 would work well.
Gyling & Blending
A very simple beer with only two gyles used. The neat thing about this beer was the fact that the first and second gyle had nearly identical BU counts because of the long boil of the second. The volumes are gal, liters, bbls and hL’s as indicated per column.
Porter | 5gal | 19L | 10bbl | 10hL |
G1 - vol | 3.03 | 11.50 | 6.05 | 6.05 |
G1 - grav | 1.072 | 1.072 | 1.072 | 1.072 |
G1 - BU | 85 | 85 | 85 | 85 |
G2 - vol | 1.97 | 7.50 | 3.95 | 3.95 |
G2 - grav | 1.047 | 1.047 | 1.047 | 1.047 |
G2 - BU | 85 | 85 | 85 | 85 |
G3 - vol | 0.00 | 0.00 | 0.00 | 0.00 |
G3 - grav | 0.000 | 0.000 | 0.000 | 0.000 |
G3 - BU | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
Hopping | 1.08oz/gal | 8.12g/L | 2.1lb/bbl | 0.81kg/hL |
Totals | OG 1.062 | FG 1.022 | BU 85 | Abv 5.3% |
Some of the best beers are the simplest grist. It's hard to beat a porter made with pale, brown and roasted malt.
ReplyDeleteBut that some amount of hops 292 oz!!! in the home brew recipes is that right. It surely would add a vegetable flavor to the porter?
I am also hoping to brew a variation of Barclay Perkins EI 1851 porter this weekend.
I believe the boil hops are a simple typo , probably 2.92 oz @ 120 min , that would bring it closer to 80 IBU's . I do like the newer format of recipe posting. This is a typical and straight forward recipe for the time frame, I have seen many just like it, simple is good .
ReplyDeleteEven though a lot of the recipes in this time period are just pale, brown and black malts, I've found that small changes in the percentages make big differences in the finished beer. It is pretty similar to some recieps I've brewed from the 1850's but that's a considerably higher amount of black malt. Most of the ones I've brewed were around 3% for the porters and 2% for the stouts, so it be interesting to try this one at 6% black malt.
ReplyDeleteyes, 2.92. I have received my special dialing wand for my fat fingers. :)
ReplyDeletePer the usual, for these type of older recipes, the hops are your choice. I would, however, use a single variety.
Kristen , Is that from Homer's famous 911 call ? and do you need to mash the keypad with your palm now ?
ReplyDeletecorrect. :)
ReplyDeleteRon,
ReplyDeleteGood that you include a Norwich beer
Cheers Will
I know this post is old, but is there any way we can get a brief look at what the other recipes from this brewery were like? Interested in seeing what the beers were like with overly simple recipes.
ReplyDeleteI know this is an old post, but what accounts for the difference between the totals for the gyles (OG 1062) and the recipe (OG 1066)? Are the gyles just actual figures from a particular brew day that missed the target slightly?
ReplyDeleteJosh K,
ReplyDeleteI suspect that's just a mistake on Kristen's part.