Favourite beer

[grahamhobbs]

What's your favourite beer? After years of Guinness, mine are Fuller's 1845 and Adnam's Broadside.

Does anyone know a homebrew recipe for making one of the above?

[gregorach]

Guinness is a bit tricky to reproduce... My usual stout recipe is fairly simple: 80% Pale Malt, 10% Flaked Barley, 10% Roast Barley, for an OG of about 1.045, and about 45 IBUs of bittering hops (usually Northern Brewer, but I don't think it makes much difference). Liquor is biased more towards chloride than sulphate (in fact, I don't think I add any sulphate for this), and I use Wyeast WY1084 Irish Ale yeast strain. Gassing with nitro-mix helps with the head, but it's still not quite the real thing. Can't help you at all on the others.

I'm not sure I could pick a favourite beer... I make some beers I really like, but my taste varies according to the season. At the moment, I'm mostly making darker beers such as 80/- and the porter-ish oddity I'm working on (I'm trying to produce a beer that tastes and feels like some crazy 9%+ Imperial Stout, but is less than 5% so you can drink several pints without falling over). If you put a gun to my head and forced me to pick the best beer I've ever had, it would probably have to be the Baltic Porter brewed by one of my friends in the Scottish Craft Brewers... Although the Orkney Dark Island Reserve was quite something too. But I wouldn't want either on a hot summer's day... For that, it would have to be either one of my own Pale Ales (I have 2 I'm happy with and I'm working on a third) or Cairngorm's Trade Winds.

[gregorach]

A bit of Googling suggests that some people (no idea who or whether to take them seriously) think that the Woodfordes 3kg Nog Porter kit is quite similar to Adnam's Broadside... I'd take that with a pinch of salt myself, but the Woodfordes kits have a fairly decent rep. If you're that way inclined, of course...

[old tree man]

Ooooooo favourite beer well i have tried a vast number of brews all around our little island but i always end up drinking my favourite three
1 Theakstons old peculiar
2 Jennings sneck lifter
3 Badgers tangle foot
i could go on but but you still can't beat a good malt, thanks Scotland

[MKG]

Despite trying hard, I've never drunk anything quite like any of Adnams beers. Kit makers beware - don't believe the hype.

I'm going to agree with OTM on the first two of his choices - but in my distant memory is something about Tanglefoot that I can't quite remember (maybe that's it).

Dunc, you appear to be a confirmed beer man with a fair amount of experience - care to give us the benefit of that?

Mike

[phil55494]

Favourite beer, the one you just bought me
Second favourite would probably be to one I bought for myself.

In reality there are a few beers that I do think are totally stand out drinks.
Marble Pint - A pale and hoppy session beer that packs bags of flavour into 3.9%
Thornbridge Jaipur - Full on modern british take on an IPA
Cantillon Geuze - A classic from Brussels made in a brewery that is more like a museum capturing the local wild yeasts for a distinctive sour flavour.

It's a good job I like pale and hoppy beers as that is what a lot of the many micro brewerier in the Manchester area make

[gregorach]

Dunc, you appear to be a confirmed beer man with a fair amount of experience - care to give us the benefit of that?

In what sense?

[grahamhobbs]

Gregorach, thanks for your leads. A simpletons query, if you use a kit and that makes a beer of 4.5% and I want one of say 6%, I could obviosly add more sugar, but wouldn't it be better to reduce the amount of water you add - but how would you calculate that?

[Green Aura]

Dunc, you appear to be a confirmed beer man with a fair amount of experience - care to give us the benefit of that?

In what sense?

I think he's suggesting you write us a tutorial - like Mike did for wine making. And if he's not, might I?

[gregorach]

Gregorach, thanks for your leads. A simpletons query, if you use a kit and that makes a beer of 4.5% and I want one of say 6%, I could obviosly add more sugar, but wouldn't it be better to reduce the amount of water you add - but how would you calculate that?

Firstly, the alcohol strength ratings on kit beers are more-or-less nonsense. Ideally, you'd have made the kit before and taken gravity readings at both start and end, so you'd know how strong it really is. Alcoholic strength is trickier than you might think, but at this level, we can assume that it's roughly (starting gravity - finishing gravity) / 7.4.

So, 4.5% is a drop of about 33 points of specific gravity from start to finish. Normally for a kit, that would mean starting somewhere around 1.045 (from here on, I'll drop the "1.0" bit, so "45") and finishing around 12 (they never attenuate as far as the instruction say, in my experience, but never mind...). To make a 6% beer, you'd need a drop of 6 * 7.4 = 45 points of gravity. The final gravity isn't going to change (much), so we need to start at 12 + 45 = 57 degrees.

How do we make our kit end up at 57 degrees? Fortunately, it's a simple linear proportion: our kit was originally 45 degrees in a volume of, say, 20L (probably closer to 22.5, but let's keep the arithmetic simple...) so we have a total of 20 * 45 = 900 "litre-degrees of extract" available to us (this is what I'd expect for a 3kg all-malt kit). To produce a 57 degree wort, we would make that up to 900 / 57 = 15.8 litres. Call it 16 litres.

Did that make any sense?

[gregorach]

I think he's suggesting you write us a tutorial - like Mike did for wine making. And if he's not, might I?

Ah. Oh dear...

Without wanting to sound off, it's not really a subject I think you can do justice to in anything short of a book (well, several books actually) - and fortunately, a number of people who are both better brewers and far better writers than I have already done it. There's also a wealth of good info on the 'net - Jim's Beer Kit being an excellent place to start.

I'm happy to try and answer specific questions, but a whole "how to brew" tutorial would be a pretty major undertaking - more than I'm currently willing to commit to. The Scottish Craft Brewers are still waiting for the yeast propagation tutorials I've been supposed to be writing for the last 6 months...

[grahamhobbs]

Gregorac, thanks that was as they say 'as clear as a bell', no seriously it was crystal sharp and much appreciated. I don't drink that heavily anymore, only a couple of pints a week and prefer a small quantity of strong (flavoured) beers these days, which tend to be the most expensive. Your advice has given me the incentive to get the homebrewing kit out again.

[clanpowell]

Rochfort 10
Anything from Westvlerten (When I can get it)
Duvel
Innes and Gunn
Pigs Ear (Uley Brewery)

Best homebrew I've made was a Belgium Xmas beer last year. One bottle of it left which I'm saving for 25th this year.

[Carltonian Man]

Hi Graham
Haven't tried it but found this for Adnams Broadside
http://www.the-online-homebrew-company. ... mit=Search

[crowsashes]

usually whatever my grandads drinking. ..tangle foot usually goes down really well as does the odd bottle of black sheep ale . just keep me away from crabbies ginger beer, that stuff goes down way to well