|BACKGROUND|

Sometimes brewing something weird doesn’t inherently mean I need to use obscure ingredients that I see on Chef’s Table or drawing divine inspiration from some sort of psychedelic-fueled spirit journey (note: that hasn’t happened. Yet.) On rare occasions, looking backwards to the past can actually offer up some great inspiration.

A little over 8 months ago, user tmsjms posted on reddit about finding an old brewing journal from the 1850’s. Upon everyone showing great interest in the journal, they uploaded more details from inside the books, ranging in everything from instructions on how to brew and set up barrels, pricing ingredients, water treatment, and of course, recipes. Almost everything from English milds to barleywines seemed be listed. Even though it was a short book, clocking in at a mere 32 pages, it was quite an interesting read. Inspiration struck me almost instantly.

Burton Ales themselves are a strange breed. Aptly named, due to hailing from the Burton-on-Trent region of England, the style itself is, unfortunately, become a bit nebulous over the course of history. The BJCP qualifies it as “A rich, malty, sweet, and bitter dark ale of moderately strong alcohol. Full bodied and chewy with a balanced hoppy finish and complex malty and hoppy aroma. Fruity notes accentuate the malt richness, while the hops help balance the sweeter finish”, which sounds an awful lot like a barleywine. Even then, the term “Old Ale” has begun to see interchangeable use with it. The style has also been described as “a draught beer darker and sweeter than bitter, named originally after the great brewing town of Burton-on-Trent”, which also isn’t particularly helpful in classifying things. Even today, aside from a few traditional English breweries like Theakston or Tonbridge, the majority of breweries don’t brew burton ales. A few exceptions that I’m aware of are Ballantine, who discontinued the beer in the 1960’s until now-owner Pabst brought it back in 2015, and Dogfish Head’s Burton Baton, which is a Burton-influenced IPA blend, where they blend an imperial IPA and an English strong ale and then age it in oak for a month. Other than that, sadly, Burton ales seem to be one of the many styles that have slowly become forgotten in the annals of time.

Compared to most “normal” brews these days, it’s interesting to view this one through the historical lens. It’s certainly an odd recipe, where the grains are actually a minor source of the fermentables in the batch, but there’s a good reason for that: taxation. It was simply more cost effective for breweries to use basic sugar ingredients and herbs than malts and hops. This also explains the use of the gentian root in the recipe. That time frame also saw the emergence of styles in Scotland that were identified by the price per barrel, coining (harr) the term “shilling ale”, in which the lower numbers were lower alcohol and vice versa, with beers like table beers and milds being 28 or 48 and Wee Heavys ending up around 90. Given that this recipe is from the 1850’s poor Charles’ recipes were going to suffer that sting.

One of the other things worth noting is that, historically, most of the yeast that brewers were using back in the day weren’t the isolated monocultures that we typically use for brewing today. In fact, Alan Pugsley, the owner/founder of Shipyard Brewing, specifically likes to tout that their house strain of Ringwood (a love it or leave it in the community) is the traditional blend from England, not the isolated strain you can buy from the store. Since I was trying to keep with the historical trend, I figured that making my own blend of English yeasts would only be proper. Ideally, I wanted to try and get my hands on some Barclay Perkins yeast, but there are very few breweries still using that strain, and even fewer, if any, that I’d be able to get in the US. To this end, I decided on using three “authentic” strains: the isolated Ringwood (Wyeast 1187), Yorkshire Square Ale (WL037), and although I was hoping to be able to harvest something even more old school, the lack off accessible bottle conditioned beers led me to just harvest dregs from a bottle of Conniston’s Blue Bird, one of my favorite bitters. All in all, a consolation I was happy to take.

The only other step from there was to adapt the recipe down to a reasonable scale. Since the original recipe was in 18 gal. units, I pretty much just divided by three to make a roughly usable 6 gallon recipe. Easy enough.

To keep things slightly more “historically accurate”, I also picked up a handy-dandy pouch of Burton salts, because hey, why not. It’s an easy way to mimic water profiles and now i just don’t have to add my normal CaCl addition to my water adjustment. I also opted to keep it correct and ferment in my 5 gallon oak barrel, which was perfect, given that I had completely burned out any sort of whiskey character by now.

Now, there was one final hurdle for brewing this batch – the hops. By simply scaling down the recipe, I needed to use a whopping 10 oz. of hops. Of course, that’s an easy undertaking for an IPA, but in an English ale? Ludicrous. It’d either be far too bitter or far too hoppy… if I were to rely on pellets. Since we were in the season for it when I found the recipe I reached out to some of my acquaintences in homebrew club to see if anyone had any wet hops coming around and I got lucky. One person was able to give me about 3 oz. of fresh Columbus and another gave me 7 oz. of fresh nugget. While 10 oz. of hops may still seems like a daunting amount, it’s important to know that wet hops only have about 1/4-1/5 the potency of dried, pelletized hops. Therefore, the 10 oz. of Columbus and Nugget I was using actually only amounted to about 2-2.5 oz. of “real” hops, which was perfect for what I was shooting for. Not having a real basis of what IBU I’m supposed to be shooting for in a recipe, I just said “prominent hop character” is good enough for me.

Them Digits

Batch Size: 5.5 gallons

Mash Temp: 154 F for 60 min.

Boil Time: 60 min.

Batch Efficiency: 82%

Original Gravity: 1.084 // 20.2 P

Final Gravity: 1.010 // 2.8 P

Estimated ABV: 10.3%

IBUs: ~57 IBU (estimated)

Color: 6.3 SRM // 12.3 EBC

Recipe

Malts

5# Pearl Malt | 38%

4# Lyle’s Golden Syrup | 31%

3# Organic Cane Sugar | 23%

1# Honey | 8%

Hops

3 oz. Nugget Wet Hops (14% AA) @ 60 | ~20 IBU

7 oz. Columbus Wet Hops (15% AA) @ 30 | ~37 IBU

Yeast

1x pack of Wyeast Ringwood (Wyeast 1187)

1x vial of White Labs Yorkshire Square Ale (WLP037)

Propped dregs from 1 bottle of Conniston’s Blue Bird Bitter (Fermented at ~70F)

Spices and Stuff

1/2 oz. Dried Gentian Root, added into priming solution @ bottling

Water Shit

1 mL 88% Lactic Acid

2 oz. pack of MoreBeer’s Burton Brewing Salts

|BREW LOG|

As I had mentioned in the intro, the first part of the brewing process was to get the whole yeast situation ironed out. To start with, I made a 1L starter with some DME to prop up the dregs from the Conniston bottle, which was going to need the most time to build up a proper cell count. After 2 days, I then pitched the other two containers of yeast into the flask to give them time to mingle and become friends, as well as make sure they were healthy.

From there, it was onto the actual brewday.

It’s always a little bit strange to do beers with a small grist, regardless of how much sugar I might be adding later on. Only using 5# of malt in a batch just feels… odd. Not that everything I brew has to be some triple digit OG behemoth of an alcoholic monster, but it just seems like I’m not using enough ingredients to make what I should be making. So, with only the 5# of Pearl in the mash, I had to heat up only 1.66 gallons of water to strike temp, which was fairly quick by comparison to the usual 4 or 5. I added in 1 mL of lactic acid for pH adjustment and then dumped in 1 oz. of the bag of Burton salts, setting aside the last ounce for the sparge. I mean, the package said that it was probably fine for only 1 oz. in a 5 gallon batch but… I also didn’t really have a need for it after this, so want not, waste not.

The mash temp came in right on target at an even 154F. Slightly higher than I typically go for, but I was hoping to compensate for the fact that over 60% of this beer was coming from simple sugars that were almost entirely going to ferment out, so I wanted to have some residuals from the mash to help temper out what, potentially, should turn out to be a pretty heavy hitter abv wise.

While the mash was going, I collected 7 gallons of water in my kettle and started the much slower process of rising that up to sparge temp, as well as adding the remaining ounce of Burton salts to the kettle. After an hour, I collected the scant gallon of first runnings and did a 15 minute batch sparge on the grains, which almost entirely filled my cooler/mash tun. A little bit of vorlaufing, and then I added the second runnings to my first which came in at a whopping 1.026, which meant I had great efficiency, but seemed super low going into the boil. That was soon to change, however.

With the boil hitting full steam ahead, I added the first round of hops at 60 minutes, allowing plenty of time for the Nugget to contribute its trademark bitterness and get the lead out on the first bit of wet hopping. From there, I waited for the wort to stablize again, since the hops were cold due to being in my freezer, and then began to add in the sugar additions in roughly 5 minute intervals to not stop the boil entirely. At 30 minutes in, I added the second, much larger addition of Columbus wet hops. It felt weird to not use the hop spider in lieu of just bagging up each addition separately, but there was no real way that my poor little guy could handle having 10 oz. of whole cone hops shoved through it.

After the 60 minutes were up, it was time to chill the wort and add in the honey. As I have learned from some relatively vocal individuals, boiling honey doesn’t really do anything and pushing honey past its denaturation point gives you less honey flavor in your final product. So, I waited until the wort was about 180F to dissolve the honey into solution.

Ideally, this is where I would have wanted to add the gentian root as well, to give it a proper steep, however, I ran into an issue – I didn’t have the gentian root on hand because I wasn’t actually supposed to be brewing this beer on this brew day. I had originally planned to brew the Niji series, but through a whole series of trials and tribulations, got shit on by the USPS’s ever reliable service (despite ponying up extra for expedited shipping and all that jazz), so I didn’t have the sake yeast for the batch. Since I wasn’t planning on brewing this one, I also didn’t have the gentian root for this one either. Damned if you do, damned if you don’t. After trying to scramble for the ingredient at every holistic medicine joint, tea vendor, CVS, and brew store around, I resigned myself to the fact I was going to have to add it to the priming solution and hope that it came through enough. Bringing the beer down to a cool 68F, the next step was to rack things over.

All in all, I ended up with close to 6 gallons of wort, it was time to get this bad boy into the barrel. Since I wasn’t going into a carboy where it’d be a little easier to oxygenate the wort, I hit it with pure O2 through my stone for 90 seconds, mainly since I knew this beer was also going to be higher octane. The night before, the barrel had been filled up with boiling water, both to swell the barrel and also to completely sterilize anything that might have been lurking in the crevices. After draining the barrel, I added in the yeast started, since that was pretty important to the process. I knew going in that 6 gallons pf liquid does not go into 5 gallons of space, so I had to make it count. That meant, unfortunately, a little more than a full gallon of wort was going to waste. From there, bung in hole, hose in bottle, yeast goes to town.

Checking the gravity of the wort after everything was set up, the starting gravity of the batch came in at a pretty solid 1.080 (1.082, adjusted). Pretty much inline with what I was thinking I was going to end up with. This was gonna be a biggun’.

It was pretty much an immediate liftoff. The next morning, it was clearly visible that the the yeasts were going absolutely gangbusters, since they had easily pushed a few cups of wort out of the barrel through the blow off tube. These lads were going straight up mental. This did finally settle down after another day or two, but I let everything for for 2-3 weeks, pending the schedule to finally get around to bottling.

Due to the nature of the barrel being not as transparent as a carboy is, I had to rack out of it first to see just how much beer I was going to end up with to figure out the proper amount of sugar that I was going to need for priming. I ended up with about 4.5 gallons of beer, which is slightly sad, seeing that I was hoping for as much as possible. On the other hand, the yeast wombo combo took this bad boy down to 1.010 (1.008, adjusted), meaning I had a casual 10.3% sipper on my hands. This is the nature of not having as much fermentation space as usual, unfortunately. With that number in mind, I made a simple syrup solution with 2.8 oz. (.38 cups) of sugar. While I was dissolving the sugar, shooting for the 2.1 vol/CO2 typical of a barleywine. I added in .5 oz. of the chopped, dried gentian root to the solution, which imbued it with a earthy, herbal, and slightly floral quality. After giving it some time to cool, as well as infuse the flavor, I strained the syrup into the beer and gave it a light mix with a sanitized spoon. A case and a half’s worth of bottles later, it was up to the passage of time to finish the job.

|TASTING NOTES|

Out of the bottle, the beer pours a gorgeous gold to light copper. It’s almost crystal clear and throws up a fluffy white head that lingers and laces down the glass.

The aroma of the beer is relatively non-descript. There’s a little bit of malt and a little bit of honey, with maybe a twinge of love. Otherwise, the actual bouquet on the beer isn’t overwhelming.

As far as flavor goes, he simplest way to sum up the beer is that it almost drinks like a Belgian strong golden ale. Despite not having any Belgian yeasts in it, I get some esters that make me think that way. There’s a little bit of a banana/bubble gum quality lurking in the wings, but it’s predominately driven by a malty and honey flavor, followed by a clean bitterness, the typical English stonefruit flavor, and a lingering floral kick combined with an oaky bass tone. For being a double digit beer, it’s really smooth and feels well balanced. While the hops are present, in the form of a nice bitterness, they also have a slight presence in the flavor as well, with a hint of a piney and resiny bite at the back.

Despite finishing in the single digits, the beer is also not lacking in the way of mouthfeel. It’s not as full bodied as a super adjunct stout, but it’s definitely not a dry as I’d expect for the higher alcohol and lower finishing final gravity. Also, despite having the tanins from the barrel itself, it doesn’t hit that mouth drying quality either.

Despite the fact that I feel odd using more sugar than malts in a beer, I’d be hard pressed to argue with history. The Brits of yore obviously knew what they were doing. Aside from some mildly modern takes on the production process, this is a super tasty beer. As much as I’d like to pour one out for my dead homie Charles, I’d feel pretty remiss about wasting any of this batch. The only other point that I might make about this would be I’m definitely a little intrigued to see what age might do to this. It’s decidedly in a barleywine wheel house, and I don’t think it needs it, but I think maybe a few months to a year will really bring this one into its own.