Brew on!
It’s a Wednesday night brewday here at The Boxshed, and we’re brewing up a beer that’s been in the planning for yonks now. Boxshed Timmy’s Original is a special concoction created specially for our pal Tim. He likes drinking beer, so we asked him if he’d like us to make him gallons of the stuff to his own taste just for the hell of it. Unsurprisingly he was pretty keen on the whole plan, so we’ve been messing around with BeerSmith for a while now tailoring the perfect recipe. Today it all came together, and there seemed no good reason not to get the whole shebang underway as soon as possible. Which was about 6pm today. It’s all good so far.
Tim used to love the old Flowers Original draught recipe, so the first thing we did was think about the hops. We ordered a load of Target hops from Craftbrewer down in Oz. Powerful Target coppers featured in both Flowers Original and IPA, as far as anyone can tell. I can’t recommend Craftbrewer enough actually – get a big order together to make the postage worthwhile, and go for it, you won’t regret it. Anyway, Tim is also a bit of a hophead when choosing beers at festivals, as well as a Best Bitter fan, so we planned more Target in the boil than Flowers ever would have used, in order to up the edge. We also decided to add a much bigger chunk of Styrians at the end to steep, then factored in a hefty addition of our own favourite aroma hop, East Kent Goldings, right in the middle of the whole beer soup. Selfish, huh?
To get a robust Best without too much caramel taste, we opted for a blend of four malts, including Patent, and went easy on the Crystal. A 90 minute 65-66 degree mash seemed to make sense, followed by two large equal batch sparges and plenty of runnings. The boil would also be 90 minutes, with an addition of glucose, and those three rounds of hops. SafAle S-04 would do fine for a rapid fermentation, rehydrated in sweet wort from the mashtun.
Anyway, the mash is on, we’ll see…
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- Four malts, not too much Crystal, some popcorn for head (well, torrified wheat, really)
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- Running low on pale Malt – time for another sack
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- High Alpha Target bittering hops all the way up from down under
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- You just can’t beat a good crop of EKGs…
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- …but Styrians do come close
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- Whooosh!
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- Mash on!
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- Mash in!
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- Holding up well
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- Another while to go yet, Mr Mashtun
The gift of flowers……Who would have guessed that I’d be feeling so giddy with excitement at the prospect of receiving flowers from another man!
Sounds delicious.
And to be fair, a pretty big bunch of those flowers will be appreciated closer to home, too…
[…] been very pleased with the smells emanating from the Boxshed Timmy’s Original FVs over the last week and have high hopes for this well-hopped Best Bitter. It’s already hit […]