BKB Fall 2007 Community Brew
I'll do whatever. I voted wheat/fruit, but it looks like English Brown might take it...
oh yeah! I love the nut brown idea!
Fruity/ Berry wheat = 3
English Brown = 5
I know there will be more votes, but with English Brown leading any ideas on what type of English Brown.......Mild, Northern, Southern......I've got a real interesting Northern Brown recipe........it's for a clone of Newcastle but requires making two batches and blending them.....the result 7.5 gallons of Newcastle and 2.5 gallons of a Dark Brown/Porter...........
NEWCASTLE BROWN ALE
- Brewed in the oldest beer-making city in England, Newcastle Brown Ale is a mixture of two ales, a strong dark brew and a lighter blend. Incorporating pale ale and crystal malts, and brewed with English bittering hops, this ale is the city of Newcastle's main icon.
GOODBREWING........
Is that the Brown ale recipe from the BYO clone series? That inrigued me as well. Most people don't realize that Newcastle is a blend of two different beers.
That process certainly would be an interesting board brew for sure.
My thoughts on English Brown was for a Southern type, but many people have posted thay would like a nut brown, which leans more Northern style. Newkie is a Northern Brown FWIW.
Southern BJCP:
Overall Impression: A luscious, malt-oriented brown ale, with a caramel, dark fruit complexity of malt flavor. May seem somewhat like a smaller version of a sweet stout or a sweet version of a dark mild.
Northern BJCP
Overall Impression: Drier and more hop-oriented that southern English brown ale, with a nutty character rather than caramel.
My thoughts on it were as a Knowledge Base this would be a real learning experience on how to do something new or at least new to most (new to me). Blending batches is a common practice among some breweries for Quality Control and this would give us a small example on doing it in our own brewing setting, even Bud and Bud Light are blended, they are just blended from the same recipe. This is two different recipes blended to get two totally different beers with one of them not being what was fermented out......as far as a Southern Brown, Mild Brown, or Northern Brown I have no real preference......Browns are my favorite beers.....whatever the board decides I am fine with, but I do think this would be an interesting experiment in brewing that is why I brought it up.......
The recipe is from the Classic Style Book: Brown Ale (History, Brewing Techniques, Recipes) by Ray Daniels and Jim Parker
GOODBREWING..........
I am all for the blending as a learning tool for sure. You don't see too many southern brown commercial examples around so I thought that would be interesting.
But with that said... I would rather brew the two newkie components, blend half of each to make the newkie clone, bottle all three and taste them side by side.
If we did that as a community brew I am pretty sure other homebrewing community boards would just shit down because they would learn you can't compete with the brewers over at BKB.
So I vote for Dartgods newkie experiment.
(Brown ale is my favorite style as well... as an interesting side note. That was the motive behind nominating it for a fall brew.)
So now we're looking at maming two batches, and splitting/combining them?!....I like it! As mentioned, I'm in provided I have somewhere to brew when we start....Fall is a good time I guess, but whatever.
The way the recipe is designed is it takes 2 parts of one brew (5 gallons lighter) and 1 part of the other brew ( 2.5 gallons stronger) to get the Newcastle with 2.5 gallons of Strong Beer leftover .......you could actually get three different ones from it by taking 2/3 of the lighter and 1/3 of the stronger.... that would leave you a 1/3 of the first (lighter beer) and 2/3 of the Strong beer.....definitely there are options on how you would want to do it.....this would also take about a month or so to brew.....the stronger recipe calls for conditioning for 3 weeks after fermentation and then brewing the second batch and allowing it to condition for a week after fermentation, so it might take say 5 or 6 weeks before it's ready to bottle or keg....pretty cool...
this one would defintely take some patience......you would also have to mark your fermenters so when you siphon you would get the correct amount for the blend....either in 2.5 gallon increments or 1.67 gallon ones depending on how you want to blend it and whether you want 2 or 3 different beers from the experiment...........
GOODBREWING........
Sounds cool, would we be doing two batches at the same time & getting 3 beers.
That ought to appeal to our friend and collegue "1n1m3g"
I'll be doing an extact version, could steep some grains at the start.