I have been brewing a lot of German styles over the last year or so and am getting ready to hop the pond over to UK styles. Any really basic bitter, pale, ESB, etc recipes out there that anyone is willing to share? I want to get familiar with the ingredients so the less diversity the better.
I assume I am looking at something like:
93% MO
7% british crystal
EKG hops
For yeast, I am hoping to get by with S04 for a few attempts and then get into the liquid strains.
Based on recommendations on this forum, I have done:
95% English Pale
4% English C60
1% English Chocolate
With various English hops. It’s great.
I found out after brewing this a few times I was supposed to use pale chocolate. I loved it with darker chocolate. Nice nutty flavor. I have a pale chocolate version in the fermenter now.
A while ago I made a spreadsheet of the recipes for my favourite English bitters from CAMRA’s Brew Your Own Real Ale by Graham Wheeler. The averages worked out like this:
Pale malt 94%
Crystal malt 5%
Black malt 1%
Ordinary crystal malt in the UK is 135 EBC, which is about 68 Lovibond. The water should have high mineral levels, sulphate 200-400 ppm is fine. 30-40 IBUs. A fairly expressive yeast and English hops. I think it’s OK to use American hops too but in modest amounts and no need to dry hop.
Thanks for the direction. Any input on hop addition times?
The London Pride recipe is in this post.
The blog is excellent too.
Hop times in the CAMRA book tend to be just start of boil and last ten minutes. Very occasionally some hops added after the boil. Hops tend to be Challenger, Golding’s, Target, Fuggle, Styrian Golding, East Kent Golding, Whitbread Golding, Bramling Cross.
Yes it’s an entertaining blog, though he tends to be very opinionated.
One good point the Barclayperkins blog makes is that real ale recipes often have brewer’s syrup - up to 10% of fermentables. You can make your own by boiling brown sugar with something acidic. It makes the body thinner. Not essential in my opinion.
That is very similar to the bitter that I used to brew. Not being 100% pleased with it I added 5% victory in place of some of the MO and liked it way better. I also split a batch, half with S-04 and half with Munton’s. Both turned out good.
I am using 95% Crisp MO and 5% Simpson’s Heritage (Crystal MO) with 2 Oz KG @ 60 min and 1 Oz KG @ 1 min in tomorrow’s brew
That sounds good to me. What yeast are you going with? How dark is that crystal
It says 50-60L here: Simpsons Heritage Crystal | RahrBSG | Bulk Brewing & Beer Supply Company
The description certainly sounds good.
I thought of doing the same thing with BYORA, but never got around to it.
I only did it for a handful of beers - see below (with sugar included but omit if you like or use brewer’s syrup). Somewhere online there’s also a spreadsheet with every recipe from Brewing Classic Styles by jamil Z.
For comparison here are the London Pride recipes from Barclayperkins, Graham Wheeler’s book and Roger Protz’s Real Ale Almanac:
One thing that strikes me about the Barclayperkins recipe is that with 20% maize and sugar but no crystal, it’s likely to be on the thin & dry side.
That Barclayperkins post has 2 grain bills. The grain bill in the table at the bottom is from 1958. He mentions in the text:
“Fullers now brew all-malt. There’s 5% crystal malt, 0.25% chocolate malt and the rest is pale malt.”