Home brewing antics can now be found at my other blog; http://gettinggrist.blogspot.com/

Saturday 18 June 2011

Back in the brewing habit

With Royal Ascot coming to a conclusion on Saturday, work will be easing off once I’ve done my reports on Sunday and Monday. From Tuesday onwards the week will be mine, so what better way to wind down than getting on with a new brew? I have some amber malt left over from the Simonds brew I did earlier this year. While amber’s not my favourite, I was thinking of using just a handful or two in a strongish bitter. I see from my old copy of the Real Ale Almanac that amber is listed as one of the ingredients in Abbot Ale, so something along those lines might be nice.


Most beer drinkers will be familiar with Abbot, described in the book as ‘a strong beer of enormous complexity, any tendency towards sweetness balanced by delicious hop character.’ The ingredients are listed as pale, crystal and amber malts, with challenger, northdown and target hops. Gravity 1048 with 30 units of bitterness.

I’ll have a play with those ingredients in my brewing software and see if I can get something close. I’m not looking for an absolute ‘clone’, just something along similar lines. I’ll fire up the brewery on either Wednesday or Thursday. I prefer to brew outside, rather than in the garage, so I’ll see what the weather’s doing and take it from there.

This will probably be my last brew until September. After this, work takes a nasty hold, aside from a short vacation in August. In September I might have a look at brewing some darker beers, ready for the winter ahead...

1 comment:

  1. Everytime I visit your blog I just want to sip that pint in the top right corner.

    Martin :0)

    ReplyDelete