Tuesday 19 April 2016

X - Ale

We brewed our first beer on the new kit today so thought we'd make it something a bit different. Here's the first few drops of liquor running into the mash tun this morning.

Having read a little more about X recently we thought we'd change ours a little. A beer that has changed a fair amount itself over the years. It started life as a relatively pale beer, reasonably hopped by todays standards and 7%+. It dropped to around 3% by the 50's,was quite dark (usually) and used very little hops.

Quite a change.

Seems fair we follow suit and start changing ours around a bit

We hadn't based our previous X recipe on any specific beer, more a very vague notion of what we thought X was probably like towards the end of the 19th Century. Having read a bit more it resembles a Barclay Perkins recipe we found from 1886 which wasn't much like any other X ales we saw from anywhere else in history having a fair amount of brown malt in the grist and being around 6.5%. Not even at Barclay Perkins themselves could we see another like this (they were quite "experimental" it seems), so maybe we were being very unintentionally very specific...

It's amazing how much this beer has changed so we thought it would be interesting to brew a range of different and slightly more specific and historically accurate ones and post up what we're doing.

Starting for no particular reason other than it looking the most palatable to us we began right in the middle of X's history, 1915 at the Courage brewery.

We lifted this recipe from Ron Pattinsons blog so props to him and Kristen for spending the time researching and uploading it. There's a few changes but all in the spirit of achieving something more representative of the original beer with the resources available to us.


Recipe Specs
----------------
Batch Size (L):           2000.0
Total Grain (kg):         404.000
Total Hops (g):           4492.69
Original Gravity (OG):    1.057  (°P): 14.0
Final Gravity (FG):       1.015  (°P): 3.8
Alcohol by Volume (ABV):  5.45 %
Colour (SRM):             14.5   (EBC): 28.6
Bitterness (IBU):         26.2   (Tinseth)
Brewhouse Efficiency (%): 90
Boil Time (Minutes):      60

Grain Bill
----------------
145.000 kg Fawcetts Vienna (35.89%)
145.000 kg Fawcetts Mild (35.89%)
40.000 kg Fawcetts Maris Otter Pale (9.9%)
24.000 kg Fawcetts Crystal (5.94%)



50.000 kg Invert 3 (12.38%)  added towards end of fermentation

Hop Bill
----------------
444.3 g Cluster Pellet (5.2% Alpha) @ 120 Minutes (Boil) (0.2 g/L)
376.2 g Cluster Pellet (5.2% Alpha) @ 120 Minutes (Boil) (0.2 g/L)
1350.8 g East Kent Goldings Pellet (4.1% Alpha) @ 120 Minutes (Boil) (0.7 g/L)
1150.7 g East Kent Goldings Pellet (4.1% Alpha) @ 120 Minutes (Boil) (0.6 g/L)
600.4 g Goldings Pellet (4.2% Alpha) @ 120 Minutes (Boil) (0.3 g/L)
570.3 g Goldings Pellet (4.2% Alpha) @ 120 Minutes (Boil) (0.3 g/L)

Misc Bill
----------------
Calcium Sulphate and Calcium chloride in the mash (I didnt write this down and I'm loathe to leave my comfy desk right now) If anyone really cares ask in the comments and i'll go have a proper look.
Single step Infusion at 70°C for 60 Minutes. (to mimic the limited attenuation)
Fermentation started at 18C and capped at 23C



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