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Thursday 28 January 2010

Let's Brew Wednesday - 1943 Whitbread Oat Mild

It seems like these recipes never appear on Wednesday. Never mind. 67 years have already passed before this recipe was published. One day won't make much difference.


You may remember (if your memory id better than mine) that I posted about this Oat Mild a week or so ago. It looked so fabulicious  I asked Kristen to knock up the recipe. It's an example of a brewery following government directives to use oats as a barley malt substitute.

Though it was officially called XX it's really a 4d Ale, a type of beer with its origins in the low-gravity Government Ale of the final years of WW I. You could certainly session such beers. To be honest, you could probably knock back a couple of pints an hour of this stuff and never get properly pissed.

One point. The colour was darker than Kristen lists below. It's a bit tricky to convert the colour scale Whitbread used at this time, but I reckon it's the equivalent of around 90 EBC.



Now over to Kristen for all the brewy-type details . . . . .




Whitbread - 1943 - Oat Mild
General info: Oat mild...WTH is an oat mild!? Ok, its not REALLY an oat mild. However this is one of the first instances where oats become a major part of the grist of any of ‘ beers. 1943 was not a good year for supply of regular ingredients; Something about a one-balled, tooth brush mustachioed megalomaniac from the east. All in all, a very low gravity neat little 'mild' that teaches us about the lengths people went to still get beer on the table.
Beer Specifics

Recipe by percentages
Gravity (OG)
1.028

10.2% American 6-row
1.9% Cane Sugar
Gravity (FG)
1.008

61.1% Mild Malt
6% No3 Invert
ABV
2.67%

12.4% Flaked oats

Apparent attenuation
71.43%

8.5% Crystal 75L

Real attenuation
58.51%







IBU
11.0

Mash
60min@157°F
0.88qt/lb

SRM
9.0


60min@69.4°C
1.84L/kg

EBC
23.5










Boil
60 min













Homebrew @ 70%
Craft @ 80%
Grist
5gal
19L
10bbl
10hl
American 6-row
0.56
lb
0.255
kg
30.2
lb
11.67
kg
Mild Malt
3.34
lb
1.521
kg
181.21
lb
70.01
kg
Flaked oats
0.68
lb
0.310
kg
36.67
lb
14.17
kg
Crystal 75L
0.46
lb
0.209
kg
25.07
lb
9.69
kg
Cane Sugar
0.10
lb
0.046
kg
5.59
lb
2.16
kg
No3 Invert
0.33
lb
0.150
kg
17.9
lb
6.92
kg
Hops








Goldings 4.5% 60min
0.57
oz
16.2
g
35.43
oz
0.856
kg
Fermentation
62°F /16.7°C















Yeast
Safale S04





WLP007 Dry English ale





Wyeast 1099 Whitbred ale













Tasting Notes:
Raw bread dough, porrage and lightly toasted bread. Hints of figs, plums and a rummy raisin note in the end. Very smooth and mouthfilling which finishs quite dry. Very refreshing and easy to drink, tastes no where near as smal as it is.


Ingredients and technique
Grist & such
A very neat little grist for a low gravity mild. Nearly everything in this recipe is strictly from the UK. About 10% American 6-row malt would have been definitely left over from pre-war years. Nearly 25% of this beer is adjunct with the rest comng from the mild malt. Its very hard to duplicate the flavor of mild malt so try and find some. The invert No3 is only 6% so if you miss it that’s not a massive problem. Get some dark unrefined sugar as a possible substitute.

Hops
Hops? Yeah, they are here somewhere. Oh, here they are. 0.76lb/ bbl is very little which the 11bu’s indicate. Only a single addition at the beginning would have done it along with a healthy pressing of the hops.

Mash & Boil
A very high mash temperature would really be the only way that they could possibly get any sort of body left in this beer without having to add more No3 invert…which they didn’t have.  The boil is a very short 60min which is very uncommon but you have to save money and fuel some how.

Fermentation, Conditioning & Serving
A cool fermentation temp would have ensured a good amount of sweetness. This thing fermented out in 3 days, into the cask on the 4th day and then off to the pubs. Not something that sat around for even a little time. Condition to about 2vol of CO2 or so and drink copious amounts of.

Gyling & Blending
There is a gyle for this. It’s probably one of the most extensive and exhausting gyles I’ve seen anywhere, at any brewery. Four different gyles were used, along with a good amount of return, to blend this beer and ferment in 4 separate fermenters each one having exactly the same starting gravity. Crazy cool. HOWEVER, not something we need to worry about for this beer.

11 comments:

  1. Errrr - you're a century out in your header, mate …

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  2. How would the oats have been mashed? Cooked before mashing or straight into the mash?

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  3. Tim, flaked oats were mashed along with the other grains. details will follow in a later post.

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  4. What's the advantage of party-gyling to end up with four worts at exactly the same gravity?

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  5. 4 gyles of different strengths were blended to make a single beer that was fermented in 4 tuns.

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  6. Beers were very rarely a single gyle. Usually they were two or three. It's just the way they brewed.

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  7. I might be coming in a little late here, but this is I think the second mild recipe I've seen that uses a portion of American 6-row. Was this to add some husk material since the oats were lacking? I don't recall the last recipe having any adjuncts. I think that was a pale mild at 1.050 OG.

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  8. Seanywonton, pretty much everything brewed in Britain in the 20th century contained American 6-row. It was all about nitrogen content.

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  9. In reading some of your more recent recipes it looks like you are going with crystal 120L instead of 75L. Would you make that switch here?

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  10. Chris,

    it's impossible to say. It's not recorded in the log. It can only ever be a guess which type of crystal is right.

    ReplyDelete
  11. Brewed this for a thematic event on British beers here in Brazil.

    Good malt profile (used Muntons for Mild and Crystal). Definitely looks bigger.

    Not as dark as I expected. Here's a picture:

    http://cervejadeapartamento.files.wordpress.com/2014/08/mild.jpg

    Cheers!

    ReplyDelete