Honey Mild

Mild hasn't been generally available in pubs in my lifetime. Samuel Smith's do a dark one which I think is worth trying, and I have brewed a couple of dark ones recently.

Whilst many homebrew recipes call for dark malts, it is clear from "Shut up about Barkley Perkins" that many historical milds would have had limited, if any, dark malts. These were usually darkened with various sugar syrups or caramel.

I wanted to try a light mild, and instead of using a light sugar syrup, using honey to add a slight darkening and add aromatic complexity.

I brewed with some organic wild honey. The chestnut coloured honey was slightly crystallised, and had a dirty (English English - as in messy) slightly earthy (as in US dirt like) rich honey flavour.

Interestingly this use of sugar syrups provides a bit of a link to the Belgian world of beer. Famously various Trappist and abbey beers use Candi sugar. Recently I have been interested in the possible link between Orval and historical English IPA (including use of Brettanomyces). I can't help noticing this recipe is something like an anglicised Tripple. I think the use of sugar is something interesting to play around with.

Hops

I had some archer hops to try. Supposedly they have apricot notes which I thought might go well with the honey. I have been using WLP002 yeast recently, which tends to drop out well, but to ensure clear beer I find it's best to boil hops a little bit rather than just steep them. This means late additions are difficult for me, because I have to add on 15 mins to the addition timing to account for a no chill process. This means I can't really do < 15 mins additions without missing the boil all together and risking haze. I might have to find a solution to this in future, but this experiment seems to suggest boiling is not as flavour stripping as once thought. I elected to add 567 g 5 mins to the end of the boil (20 minutes equivalent).

Water

The water profile was adjusted to add a little crispness and try and coax some sharper citrus notes from the hops. Obviously British hops aren't as citrus as new world counterparts, but over dosing gypsum in an early homebrew-career light-bitter, that used first gold hops, produced an astringent grapefruit flavour, evidencing the presence of such flavours. Citrus, honey, apricot  and yeast was something I was looking for. The sulphate to chloride ratio was gently tipped in favour of sulphate.

Flaked barley

I wanted to have a decent head on this, and just sort of wanted to try flaked barley. My experiment with my bean saison suggested non traditional fermentables can make good beer. Reports of grainy notes from flaked barley sounded like it might meld with the rest of the beer well.

Fermentables

Final malt list was 50% pale malt (Crisp, flagon), one quarter flaked barley, and one quarter honey to OG 1.045.

Process

The mash was 1 hr with flaked barley and pale malt. The mash was fairly hot. The boil was 30 mins with hops added in last 5. The honey was added to the fermenter and hot wort poured on top. My understanding is that this drives off volatile aromatics to an extent, but I wanted to ensure the honey was well mixed, and thought with 33% of the fermentables being honey, a judicious volatilising of excess aroma might be worthwhile.

WLP002 from a starter made from bottle dreggs of my last dark mild was pitched the next morning.

Beer fermented for under one week before bottling to 1.9 vols Co2 using table sugar.

The beer was pretty interesting. I had definite haze problems and the beer was a bit too full bodied, read snotty, for me. Probably reduce flaked barley next time. The beer was in the main pretty good, slight honey character to go with the nice malty flavour. I didn't detect much fruit from the hops. All in all pleasant but uninspiring pale ale.

Interestingly, I used some bottles that previously housed some sours/Brett beers. This meant I got one sour bottle, which worked very nicely, but was a little too bitter. Another two had a medicinal note. I'm worried that propagating yeast from this batch has infected my vintage IPA.

Having had three infection problems recently, which is quite unusual for me, I need to have a bit of an overhaul of my equipment. I may also need to concede that I can't propagate yeast in a sufficiently sanitary way, which is a shame because I like WLP002 but can't justify £7 per 10 l batch. I will probably have one more go propagating from a bottle of my dark mild.

Dark Mild with Invert #3

I almost always use dry yeast, but one of my perennial problems is getting enough yeast character in native beers. I have tried using sugars in the brew and pitching less yeast to increase ester production, but ultimately I wanted to try some new strains, specifically the Fullers strain, wlp002. In Portsmouth, where I'm from, there are loads of Fullers pubs, and London Pride is probably what I first started drinking at pubs. I like low attenuating beers, and also clear beers, and since this strain flocculates extremely well and is a low attenuator I thought it was ideal.

My previous efforts with (wet?) yeast have been disastrous. One was infected and both were phenolic. These were both early brews and I thought I might venture out again, hoping my technique had improved.

I wanted a dark chocolaty mild.  This time I wanted to use no crystal malt, even though I think people are unnecessarily afraid of crystal malt, especially in a beer like a mild where you want it to be a bit smooth and caramely, but this I wanted to be a bit more authentic, and consulting Ron Pattinson's "Homebrewer's Guide to Vintage Beer" noticed that a lot of historic milds had no crystal at all. What they often did have was sugar syrup. Here I am using invert number three, home made, by heating demerara sugar in a pan with a little lemon juice at 115-120 deg c for 150 -210 minutes-ish. I used the oven so I didn't have to constantly monitor the temperature, but this probably means my temperatures were all over the place. Nonetheless a good dark syrup was obtained.

Because It was a dark beer, my water was probably fine, so I didn't fuss about water treatment for this one.

Recipe

The recipe was 20% invert syrup #3 (entered as sugar and adjusted for water weight), 5% chocolate malt and 75% pale (Crisp, flagon). I also added 10g of black malt in 10L just to darken a little more (not part of the percentages).

The hops were 12g of perle at 8.4 % aa at 60-mins for 23IBU-ish.  The beer was no chilled overnight and the yeast was pitched direct. Original gravity was 1.036.

Tasting

The beer (shown below) was bottle conditioned to 1.8 vols Co2. The fist flavour is dark malt, just a little acrid, and perhaps pushing towards (not quite) porter territory. Then there is a slight watery element with a hint of rummy-ness. Quite a complex malt character with roast, sweet at tip of tongue and dry and watery at the back. The low carbonation is nice. The beer is a few shades darker than coke, and is almost opaque but when held to the light it can bee seen to be clear.

The yeast was expressive, but had a slight twang that I associate with the slurry at the bottom of the fermenter. I might need to start oxygenating my wort a bit more  since this is unnecessary with dry yeast, but could be a problem with my no chill process, with limited shaking after transferring hot wort to the fermenter.

A nice but unremarkable beer. I have noticed however,that these slightly boring dark milds definitely get finished the fastest. The low abv, low carbonation and non challenging flavour all contribute to this. It just seems hard to get bored of something boring? Next time I might try and sacrifice some clarity for a little more body by adding oats or something.