This brew is a brown stout, as opposed to the more familiar black stout; it is a rich amber colour. Stouts are so called because of their ‘mouth-feel’ something everyone who has tried the most famous of all stouts, Guinness, will understand. Fairly ancient recipes for brown stouts abound; one from the Gentleman’s Magazine of 1768 called for nothing more than brown malt, hops, water and yeast, though you would need to get a grip on bushels and hogsheads. The 1919 beer is light in flavour and has a creamy head, courtesy of the oat malt.
Ingredients
- 2.7 kg English pale ale malt
- 1 kg oat malt
- 1 kg high-colour crystal malt
- 800 g chocolate malt
- 500 g dark malt extract, such as Muntons Dark Spraymalt
- 65 g Fuggles hops
- 4 tsp gypsum
- 2 tsp salt
- 2 tsp dried carragheen
- 11 g sachet English ale yeast
- 12 g East Kent Golding hops
- 50 g sugar for priming
How to Make It
- Mix the malt grains in a fermenting bucket and stir in 15 litres water at 75°C. The mash heat should be 67°C. Cover and keep warm for 2 hours.
- Sparge with water at 77°C until you have 25 litres wort. Transfer to your copper.
- Boil for a total of 1½ hours, adding the malt extract, 25 g of the Fuggles hops, the gypsum and salt at copper-up, the rest of the Fuggles hops at 45 minutes and the carragheen at 1¼ hours. Leave to stand for 40 minutes.
- Transfer to your fermenting bucket, straining out the used hops. Liquor down until the specific gravity is at 1050, then cool rapidly.
- Aerate and then pitch the yeast at 20°C. Leave to ferment for about 5 days until fermentation is complete and the specific gravity is around 1015.
- Rack into a barrel or wide-neck fermenter and add the Golding hops in a muslin bag. Rumble the barrel every day for 3 weeks.
- Prime and continue as usual for a cask beer or bottled beer.