Greene King Abbot Ale

Wow, great thread, all the big guns offering excellent information...

BB

Yes BB, I have been reading this with great interest .

I got a few paragraphs in and got confused

I only posted because the thread happened to be touching one of my pet subjects. I won't be making a habit of it.

Attempting to tell the world-wide home brewing movement that they have been doing it wrong all these years tends to put a few noses out of joint.

No Graham, your a great inspiration to my 30+ years of brewing, keep posting..

BB

I only posted because the thread happened to be touching one of my pet subjects. I won't be making a habit of it.

Attempting to tell the world-wide home brewing movement that they have been doing it wrong all these years tends to put a few noses out of joint.

No Graham, your a great inspiration to my 30+ years of brewing, keep posting..

BB

Indeed keep going Graham. Very interesting stuff you have posted there. I also think it is good to see you admitting that you didn't always get it right - something that others could learn from.

Attempting to tell the world-wide home brewing movement that they have been doing it wrong all these years tends to put a few noses out of joint.

Whilst I appreciate the masses of input from you, if Tinseth is as flawed as you make out, what are the better alternatives?

For us who are not mathematically minded, we have to use what is given to us, so unless you have a new formula or something to put out there, I doubt that will change much unfortunately.

For me, it's the closest to how I want my beers to taste bitterness wise, whether it is accurate or not, it suits my taste.

Whilst I appreciate the masses of input from you, if Tinseth is as flawed as you make out, what are the better alternatives?

You can easily test my claims for yourself. Whenever you see (or hear on a podcast) a recipe that has had its bitterness tested, make a note of it and calculate the Tinseth bitterness, either using the Tinseth tables, a spreadsheet, or your favourite brewing software. That is how I arrived at my accuracy conclusions and which prompted me to delve deeper.

My interest was initially stirred because certain detractors were saying that my recipes were overhopped, for no other reason than they did not match Tinseth. I chose a fixed utilisation of 20% in my early books because it was a convenient round number and a good median between the range of beers included in the book, the errors would have been insignificant in the light of the other variables involved, particularly the accuracy to which we know the alpha acid of our hops to begin with. As it happens 15% would have been closer to the mark, and this means that, at 20%, my beers, rather than being overhopped, were, in fact, slightly underhopped, which goes to show just how little the agitators really knew about it. I should have ignored them.

When I saw Dave Line being subjected to the same insults, I felt duty-bound to jump in and defend him.

There are no real alternatives, most of the various methods out there are much of a muchness and seem to have copied each other in an attempt to improve upon the previous bloke. Some of them are obviously pie-in-the-sky, because if you plot them out there are sudden, sharp discontinuities or impossible results if you extrapolate the graphs. All of them seem to plot ex-copper utilisation rather than overall utilisation which, although it is what commercial brewers use for quality control, is inappropriate for home brewers trying to replicate a beer.

If home brewers appreciated that these refer only to copper utilisation it would be an improvement, but the errors produced by Tinseth's formula fluctuate so widely that it would swamp any attempt to compensate for that. I am sure that the other formulae perform equally badly, if only in other respects.

If only the misplaced confidence in Tinseth could be debunked.

They all give this little get-out clause along the lines of: "the numbers need to be tweaked to match it to your system". Ignoring the bullshit involved in that statement, how the hell can anyone do that without having access to a fully-equipped, specialist laboratory?

If the laws or curves that the function follows, does not match the real world, then no amount of tweaking will improve the situation, unless you devise a different "tweak" for every different beer you brew; in which case the formula is pointless.

There were some early simpler methods out there that seemed to give better results, but I have only seen them referred to and do not have the details or know how they were derived.

For us who are not mathematically minded, we have to use what is given to us, so unless you have a new formula or something to put out there, I doubt that will change much unfortunately.

Mathematically minded or not will make little difference. I do not have another formula to put out there. I am sure that I could knock up something that would perform better than Tinseth but, if it is a complex formula, to publish it without thorough testing would make me guilty of what I am accusing the others of; that is, of trying to extrapolate too much from too little data and too little knowledge.

If I were a younger man I would probably be prepared to put the time and money in to doing a series of trials and tests, but I am an old man now and such a quest would outlast me. I will not be producing a new formula unless I can obtain data from somewhere; the literature or one of the testing labs, but this needs specialist data and targeted experiments.

For me, it's the closest to how I want my beers to taste bitterness wise, whether it is accurate or not, it suits my taste.

That is bordering on the impossible given the instability of the Tinseth formula. If it gives, say, a +100% error with one beer and a -50% error with another beer, your taste buds must be really confused or your beers all over the place. If the formula does not represent real EBUs then there is little point in using it. Using it in an arbitrary manner is also pointless. There will be simpler and more stable arbitrary methods of achieving consistency in a beer.

It would be fine for home brewers to have their own version of bitterness calculation, but if it is to predict or be related to EBUs its bounds of error must also be known, must be low and must be predicable. It takes an awful lot of tests to be able to calculate the confidence level and deviation.

I think , and have always done, that Graham's books, are probably the best available (well not available now) books for learning to brew, even if the earlier ones are now showing signs of becoming dated. The recipes in them are sound and work, not something that could be said of Dave Lines, although with a few modifications ( And that is just upping the base malts by 20%, as Graham as pointed out the bitterness of the recipes should be fine) even Dave's recipes are good.

As one of the "detractors", I have a couple of things to say.

Firstly my observations were not based on comparing Tinseth with a fixed utilisation method, but of actually brewing beers from the books and comparing them side by side with casked and bottled samples. To my palate, and others, I should point out, our versions were perceived to be consistently more bitter than the commercial beer. It was this that led David Edge to look at the effect on bittering of late hops on the overall bitterness of the beer, and he saw that there was significant utilisation of the alpha acids of such late hops and this could explain why. Coming across the Tinseth formula which added a time factor to the calculation appeared to be a boon, and the right answer. Indeed when using it I got much better results, and those results became better, when using the QA lab in my lunch times, at the brewery I was working, at to alter Tinseths Fudge factors.

Roll on 20 odd years, and a couple of changes of brewing equipment, and I have been forced, over the last couple of years, to re evaluate just how useful Tinseth is for our purposes. It works fine to give you an ex copper bitterness for a single addition of moderate alpha hops, boiled for 60 minutes in a 1.050 wort, but as Graham has so eloquently explained in this slap down you can't take that through to finished beer bitterness. . . . I'm not even sure that it would work under those conditions with the Braumeister for example. Unfortunately I wasn't ready to come out of the closet, and am still not, but what the hell.

So Graham, I am sorry to have caused you to change your mind, you had a couple of people saying the beers were over bittered, and many more saying the clones were spot on, it was your choice/decision to change how you formulated your recipes.

Where does that leave us in having a formula to work out how bitter our beers are? We can't with any sense of certainty. All the formulae do is give us a number, and how that number relates to the beer in the real world is down to the ingredients, equipment, method and perceptions of the individual brewer. I'm going back to an age old method of calculating hop usage and that is pounds per barrel, or in my case grams per litre. To come up with a 'new' formula is pointless, (although Grahams NAU method was interesting), and as Graham says does require a well equipped lab and the willingness to repeat brews many times, and make many rigorous observations. When I had access to such a lab, I was to naive to ask the right questions and now I no longer have access I'm no longer too concerned with the minutiae of brewing.

Beer just wants to be made!

I will leave you with just one other quote, which backs up something I've said in many earlier threads.

The idea is to use the same figure for utilisation for the initial brews, irrespective of the type of beer being brewed. If the beers are consistently too bitter, the utilisation factor is increased next time; if it is consistently too low, the utilisation factor is reduced. Within a few brews a figure is derived that suits the system

Of course where that leads to with beers that have large amounts of late hops is anyone's guess

I think , and have always done, that Graham's books, are probably the best available (well not available now) books for learning to brew, even if the earlier ones are now showing signs of becoming dated. The recipes in them are sound and work, not something that could be said of Dave Lines, although with a few modifications ( And that is just upping the base malts by 20%, as Graham as pointed out the bitterness of the recipes should be fine) even Dave's recipes are good.

Dave Line did make a couple of howlers, and there were some things that he didn't get quite right, but he was the best that was around at the time and his recipes were sound enough. He was not the first to write about all grain brewing by any means; there were a couple of other small, but reasonably good, books out there that did not get the recognition, but Dave Line was the first to cover the subject in such depth. The hobby was hampered by winemakers writing about brewing. They had little knowledge about the brewing process and had even less inclination to learn, so there were quite a lot of what amounted to malt-and-hop-flavoured country wine recipes out there. The first editions C.J. Berry's "Home Brewed Beers & Stouts" is laughable but Berry, also being the publisher, had the wherewithal to revise his book on an almost annual basis, usually by pinching bits word-for-word out of his other authors' books, so the later editions are not quite as jaw dropping as the early ones. He was also in a position to achieve dominance, the ruddy thing sold damn near a million copies overall, which shows you just how big the home brew hobby was in those days, and what Dave Line had to fight against. Home brewing books sold in hundreds of thousands then; the first edition of Ken Shales' "Brewing Better Beers" sold 273,000 copies, and it ran for another three or four editions. I left it rather too late to catch that particular bus.

As one of the "detractors", I have a couple of things to say.

It wasn't just you; it began as a whisper that grew into a murmur, and was beginning to make me doubt my own instincts and ability.

Firstly my observations were not based on comparing Tinseth with a fixed utilisation method, but of actually brewing beers from the books and comparing them side by side with casked and bottled samples. To my palate, and others, I should point out, our versions were perceived to be consistently more bitter than the commercial beer. It was this that led David Edge to look at the effect on bittering of late hops on the overall bitterness of the beer, and he saw that there was significant utilisation of the alpha acids of such late hops and this could explain why. Coming across the Tinseth formula which added a time factor to the calculation appeared to be a boon, and the right answer. Indeed when using it I got much better results, and those results became better, when using the QA lab in my lunch times, at the brewery I was working, at to alter Tinseths Fudge factors.

It is fine knowing that late hops contribute bitterness, but understanding why is a different matter, and you cannot account for it mathematically if the mechanism behind it is obscure. If it is beta-acid, then the effect is going to be less pronounced the fresher the hops are. Does some auto-isomerisation take place on the plant? In which case that is likely to be highly variable.

Also, many people who purposely derive bitterness by late hopping tend to use obscene amounts of hops in the current curry-house trend in home brewing, which would be uneconomical in the commercial world. The beers in my book are relatively light on late hops, well below the quantity used for the main bittering hops, and the alpha-acid content of aroma hops is usually well below that of the main bittering hops too. I assumed that any bitterness contributed by late hops would be insignificant, would be swamped by the main hops, and would serve to compensate for any deterioration in the main hops between harvest and their use. Many well-respected British beers had no late hopping at all.

I think that part of the problem is that, say, a ten-minute addition is usually sitting in the hot wort for a lot longer than ten minutes.

Roll on 20 odd years, and a couple of changes of brewing equipment, and I have been forced, over the last couple of years, to re evaluate just how useful Tinseth is for our purposes. It works fine to give you an ex copper bitterness for a single addition of moderate alpha hops, boiled for 60 minutes in a 1.050 wort, but as Graham has so eloquently explained in this slap down you can't take that through to finished beer bitterness. . . . I'm not even sure that it would work under those conditions with the Braumeister for example. Unfortunately I wasn't ready to come out of the closet, and am still not, but what the hell.

Whoops! Remind me never to drop the soap if I ever have to share a shower with you. Fortunately, for me, I do not participate in any sports so the situation is unlikely to arise. Closet? Yet more transatlantic influence?

So Graham, I am sorry to have caused you to change your mind, you had a couple of people saying the beers were over bittered, and many more saying the clones were spot on, it was your choice/decision to change how you formulated your recipes.

Like you said, It was my decision and my fault. But if a home brewer wishes to brew "a substance almost but not quite entirely unlike" beer, then surely it is the duty of a writer to satisfy that desire. In the end it made little material difference. People will have this disagreeable habit of putting my recipes into brewing software to adjust for different volumes, alpha-acid, etc. and then wondering why my utilisations turn out different from Tinseth's. Often they accuse me of being wrong, which is unfortunate. I see it all the time on the various forums (I know it should be fora, but hardly anyone says that these days).

Where does that leave us in having a formula to work out how bitter our beers are? We can't with any sense of certainty. All the formulae do is give us a number, and how that number relates to the beer in the real world is down to the ingredients, equipment, method and perceptions of the individual brewer. I'm going back to an age old method of calculating hop usage and that is pounds per barrel, or in my case grams per litre. To come up with a 'new' formula is pointless, (although Grahams NAU method was interesting), and as Graham says does require a well equipped lab and the willingness to repeat brews many times, and make many rigorous observations. When I had access to such a lab, I was to naive to ask the right questions and now I no longer have access I'm no longer too concerned with the minutiae of brewing.

I made the same mistake when I had access to a lab and some of Britain's foremost hop specialists.

If you look at the pounds per barrel or pounds per quarter quoted for some of the beers on Ron Pattinson's blog, Dave Line's interpretation was not very far out. (I refuse to use ball-park).

NAUs is a modern metric version of Dave Line's AAUs but normalised to grams per litre. It is simply the total alpha acid added to the beer expressed in grams per litre. It turns out to be the same as the usual EBU formula, but with the utilisation set to 100%. It enables one to compensate for different alpha acids and different volumes in one hit - something that you can't do with Dave Line's AAUs. It is also independent of volume, which AAUs isn't.

Any future recipes that I generate will probably express the bittering hops in NAUs. it enables any adjustments required to be made with a basic calculator and if people wish to use a utilisation formula, then they just substitute the 100% with their utilisation figure. As no utilisation is expressed I can not get the hassle of being accused of not matching Tinseth et. al. It has the advantage that it will not work directly in most brewing software until they catch up, so direct comparisons will not be possible, but that will possibly generate a different form of hassle.

Beer just wants to be made!

But does good beer want to be made?

I will leave you with just one other quote, which backs up something I've said in many earlier threads.

The idea is to use the same figure for utilisation for the initial brews, irrespective of the type of beer being brewed. If the beers are consistently too bitter, the utilisation factor is increased next time; if it is consistently too low, the utilisation factor is reduced. Within a few brews a figure is derived that suits the system

I don't really buy this theory that utilisation necessarily needs to be "tuned" to the system. I regard it as another get-out clause by the authors of these formulae to explain away the obvious errors that exist.

If people have to bugger about with utilisation to make it work, then they are not going to bother. If they brew a different recipe they are likely to have to do it all over again.

The idea behind a utilisation formula is that it takes out the variation between recipes, but the current ones do not do that. Also any error in the prediction should be the result of unaccounted for external factors that can be tuned out, not errors generated by the formula itself. As I said before, if the formula function does not match the real world than the twain can only meet at one point and will require retuning for different recipes. A good formula should only need tuning at one point, and the rest should follow automatically, but the results should be close enough by default to not justify tuning at the amateur level.

The tendency for people to attempt to speed things up by skimping on boil time may be an issue here, but that is up to them. These people are not likely spend time "tuning" their system.

Relying upon human perception to tune the system is about as unreliable as you can get.

Of course where that leads to with beers that have large amounts of late hops is anyone's guess

I suspect that will require a different approach and a separate formula, Let's hope that someone knowledgeable about the subject gets there before any of the previous workers have a go.

This issue of utilisation is one of the many stumbling-blocks that has contributed to the delay in finishing my book. I do not want to be seen to promote the fantasy, but I do not have a tried and tested alternative to offer.

I thought that one solution would be to describe the Tinseth formula to give people the option of using it, but to also give the reasons why I think that it is flawed. But this has its own issues; people quite rightly expect answers and solutions from a book of this type, not ands, ifs and buts and descriptions of flawed methods. I don't wish to describe Tinseth, but it would be dangerous to ignore it altogether without a viable alternative.

Brewing beer can get too technical, look at me..... I brew in an 8x6 shed with DIY brewing utensils, most of the recipes I guess from previous knowledge of what tastes like what. Bit like Paul Hollywood making a new fruit cake... Dunno what it'll be like but he know's it'll be good!!

But I will say the main thing for me is 1/2 a campden tablet and CRS.
BB

Brewing beer can get too technical, look at me..... I brew in an 8x6 shed with DIY brewing utensils, most of the recipes I guess from previous knowledge of what tastes like what. Bit like Paul Hollywood making a new fruit cake... Dunno what it'll be like but he know's it'll be good!!

My stuff is all home made, mostly plastic and fairly basic. My boiler is a Burco that I bought new when I first started. It is modified by fitting a bottom take-off to reduce dead space. My hot liquor tank is another Burco, bought second-hand after spotting it in a newspaper ad. My mash tun is a modified brewing bin again fitted with a bottom take-off so that the drain off and sparging flows evenly through the grain without channelling and also to reduce dead space. Everything else is bog-standard, available cheaply from any home brew shop, except my hydrometers. I bought half-decent general-purpose hydrometers from RS because the cheapo ones available from home brew shops seem to be less accurate than a wet finger. I don't have the space for a multitude of brewing set-ups of different sizes and qualities, so I have kept it as basic as I can, so that what I do and write about can be fairly closely replicated by someone starting out with similarly basic equipment. I don't believe that more expensive equipment will make better beer.

I admit that the hop utilisation thing is my current pet soapbox subject, but I am a stickler for accuracy and reliability in certain things, and the current batch of utilisation formulae exhibit neither of those qualities. What is worrying is that people seem to regard the Tinseth formula as the bee's knees (cat's whiskers for Aleman's benefit) and do not seem to know or care that a wet finger would give better accuracy. There must be better ways of standardising results between different brewers.

The thing that I like about brewing is that there is always something to learn, and the more that you learn the deeper you have to delve to learn more, and my calculations tend to extend to more and more decimal places as a result.

As an addendum to my major diatribe on page 2:
http://forum.craftbrewing.org.uk/viewtopic.php?f=62&t=8737&start=25#p118209

Where I mentioned that Crookedeyeboy's beer was tested at 48 EBU and that the Tinseth prediction was 80EBU, well I forgot to say that it now seems clear that anything above about 60 EBU will just not happen with conventional brewing, no matter how many hops are added. The maximum achievable seems to be somewhere around 60EBU. I have long suspected that something like this was going on and that the bitterness claims of the beers of some micro-brewers was pie in the sky. The Basic Brewing Radio IBU Ceiling Experiment confirms this and data supplied to me by Wallybrew, upon analysis, also confirms it.

There is a paradox inasmuch as a beer that had an obscene amount of hop pellets steeped after the boil, a kilogramme in 20 or 25 litres, produced a beer that measured around or above 100 EBU. This is so unconventional that it may be a measurement artefact. The common absorbence method of measuring bitterness is not very selective and just measures hop "stuff". It is also highly subject to interference by other things incidentally present, certain chemicals particularly, and in this case, I suspect, bits of hop powder floating around. Until an explanation is elicited for this apparent parodox, and because a kilogramme of hops is so unconventional, it is probably better to disregard it. It apparently did not taste like a 100EBU beer, not that anybody knows what a 100EBU beer should taste like.

So it is fair to assume that if Tinseth says anything above 60EBU, you can be sure that he is telling fibs.

Of course there is a maximum level of solubility of alpha acids in wort, and I certainly think that high alpha hops hit this very quickly. I don't think it matters what formula you use, once you start hitting maximum solubility levels then there is no way any of them are capable of being very accurate. I recall talking about something else and saying that as long as you are within a certain range things work as expected (Sort of), the same must be true of utilisation. I suspect that Tinseth works (ish ) at predicting wort IBU's when the wort is 1.050, it's a 60 minute boil and you use low to moderate alpha hops.

Pauls beer used a lot of high alpha hops (50% of hopping by weight) in the last 15 minutes

Of course there is a maximum level of solubility of alpha acids in wort, and I certainly think that high alpha hops hit this very quickly. I don't think it matters what formula you use, once you start hitting maximum solubility levels then there is no way any of them are capable of being very accurate. I recall talking about something else and saying that as long as you are within a certain range things work as expected (Sort of), the same must be true of utilisation. I suspect that Tinseth works (ish ) at predicting wort IBU's when the wort is 1.050, it's a 60 minute boil and you use low to moderate alpha hops.

Pauls beer used a lot of high alpha hops (50% of hopping by weight) in the last 15 minutes

I don't think that this 60 EBU ceiling is a solubility thing; I think that it is more likely to be a wort-boil kinetics thing. The solubility of raw alpha-acid is fairly low, almost insoluble at low PH and at low (normal ambient) temperature and well documented. iso-alpha-acid is far more soluble, much more so than is ever found in beer, but references vary widely as to the real figure. It would not be very difficult to incorporate a function into a utilisation formula that flattens off as you approach 60; even I could do that, and my mathematical ability is little better than average, and certainly not exceptional.

The assumption that certain observed effects are because of solubility issues is an easy trap to fall into, and I guess many of us have blundered into it at one time or another.

It has long been observed that hop utilisation decreases with increasing specific gravity. The grave error that the authors of the utilisation formulae made was to assume that it was a wort solubility thing. In fact, it has nothing at all to do with solubility. There are two mechanisms responsible for this effect, one of them as been known for a long time, and the authors should have known about it. The other I have only recently become to appreciate myself, so it would be hypocritical of me to accuse those authors of insufficient diligence.

It certainly does not follow an exponential law, as in Tinseth; it is far more likely to be substantially linear.

One thing that becomes clear when shedloads of hops are added at the beginning of the boil, above the accepted raw alpha-acid saturation level, is that isomerisation versus time follows a straight line, nothing like the exponential curve that Tinseth uses. Both the BBR data and Wallybrews data exhibit this characteristic. In the case of Wallybrew's data, the bitterness increased linearly, uninterrupted and kinkless up until the point that he stopped boiling, and it seems clear that had he boiled for 90 minutes, rather than 60, he could possibly have achieved 50% better utilisation. The obvious question that then entered my head was what if he had boiled for much longer. How long would it have been before that linearity tailed off and the rate of rise flattened out. It is almost certainly a function of the amount of hops added in excess of the saturation level. When hops are added at a level below saturation, the boil kinetics follow an entirely different curve.

Of course I am guilty of extrapolating much from very little data, but you have suffer from serious problems not to be able to recognise a straight-line trend when you see one, even if the data points are few.

This is yet another gotcha in the quest for a usable utilisation formula inasmuch as the characteristics change under different circumstances. I have long been aware that the quantity of hops added has an effect on behaviour in terms of utilisation. In fact, there seems to be an almost linear relationship between the O.G/EBU ratio and utililisation, which might be grounds for a much simpler and much more stable way of determining utilisation.

Anyway, there is just time for a quick look around the other forums before I have something to eat and start thinking about bed.

Here you go pal....

Ingredients
175g/6oz butter
175g/6oz golden syrup
175g/6oz muscovado sugar
350g/12oz porridge oats
½ lemon, finely grated zest
pinch ground ginger

Preparation method
Preheat the oven to 150C/300F/Gas 2 and line a 20cm/8in square baking tin with baking paper.
Melt the butter in a medium pan over a low heat. Dip a brush in the butter and brush the baking tin with a little bit of it. Add the golden syrup and sugar to the butter and heat gently. Once the sugar is dissolved and the butter is melted, remove the pan from the heat and stir in the porridge oats, lemon zest and ginger.
Pack the mixture into the baking tin and squash down. Bake in the oven for 40 minutes.
Once cooked, remove from the oven, leave to cool for 15 minutes, then turn out on to a chopping board and cut into squares.
These flapjacks are delicious in a packed lunch or as a grab-and-go breakfast.

Just taken a tin of these out of the oven, does look and smell feckin lovely BB .

Well this one is going down the drain. It smells like it was made in an acid factory and taste like something's died in it.

Went and got some fresh yeast from the brewery so will try it again after a couple of other brews.

Might split the yeast into some vials to store in the fridge.

After my diabolical attempt at brewing this a few weeks back, I have picked up some fresh yeast to grow and use, I will attempt this for a second time, but rather I will stick to the recipe given to me by my local club this time, it is pretty much the same just a little weaker at 5% ABV, although I did see a 1980's beer mat that listed the ABV as 5% and the O.G. at 1.046 - 1.052.

So, here is the second attempt:

1970's G.K. Abbot Ale
11C. Strong Bitter (English Pale Ale)

Recipe Specs
----------------
Batch Size (L): 23.0
Total Grain (kg): 4.530
Total Hops (g): 82.00
Original Gravity (OG): 1.050 (°P): 12.4
Final Gravity (FG): 1.012 (°P): 3.1
Alcohol by Volume (ABV): 5.01 %
Colour (SRM): 12.1 (EBC): 23.9
Bitterness (IBU): 36.2 (Tinseth)
Balance (BU:GU): 0.72
Brewhouse Efficiency (%): 80
Boil Time (Minutes): 60

Grain Bill
----------------
3.750 kg Pale Malt (82.78%)
0.285 kg Invert Sugar No. 3 (6.29%)
0.285 kg Torrified Wheat (6.29%)
0.170 kg Crystal 30 (3.75%)
0.040 kg Chocolate (0.88%)

Hop Bill
----------------
38.0 g East Kent Golding Leaf (5% Alpha) @ 60 Minutes (Boil) (1.7 g/L)
32.0 g Fuggles Leaf (5.6% Alpha) @ 60 Minutes (Boil) (1.4 g/L)
12.0 g East Kent Golding Leaf (5% Alpha) @ 14 Days (Cask) (0.5 g/L)

Misc Bill
----------------
½ Protofloc Tablet @ 15 Minutes (Boil)

Step Mash for 125 Minutes.

Mash Profile:

Step 1: 55°C @ 5 Minutes.
Step 2: 63°C @ 30 Minutes.
Step 3: 67°C @ 60 Minutes.
Step 4: 78°C @ 30 Minutes.

Fermented at 21°C with Wibblers yeast for 7 days.
Lower to 13°C 24 hours after skimming yeast.
Lower to 10°C 24 hours before racking. 

Recipe Generated with BrewMate

[Dennis King]

Out of interest Kyle the invert sugar you gave me is it No.2 or No.3.

It is No. 3 Dennis, EBC 130.

[Dennis King]

Thanks again

No problem. If this one works out I'll drop you a sample over.

Well, as my next brew is the half century since I started AG, I felt it time to revisit this beer as it has alluded me twice before now, once suffering from DMS and the other old yeast. This time I have fresh ingredients and yeast straight out if the brewery.

Dennis made this previously so I now also have a good benchmark of what the end product should be similar to, here is the updated recipe:

Abbot Ale
11C. Strong Bitter

Recipe Specs
----------------
Batch Size (L): 23.0
Total Grain (kg): 4.530
Total Hops (g): 90.00
Original Gravity (OG): 1.048 (°P): 11.9
Final Gravity (FG): 1.010 (°P): 2.6
Alcohol by Volume (ABV): 5.04 %
Colour (SRM): 13.1 (EBC): 25.7
Bitterness (IBU): 36.0 (Tinseth)
Brewhouse Efficiency (%): 75
Boil Time (Minutes): 90

Grain Bill
----------------
3.750 kg Maris Otter (82.78%)
0.285 kg Invert Sugar No. 3 (6.29%)
0.285 kg Torrified Wheat (6.29%)
0.170 kg Crystal Malt (Pale) (3.75%)
0.040 kg Black Malt (0.88%)

Hop Bill
----------------
38.0 g East Kent Golding Leaf (3.67% Alpha) @ 90 Minutes (Boil) (1.7 g/L)
40.0 g Fuggles Leaf (4.42% Alpha) @ 90 Minutes (Boil) (1.7 g/L)
12.0 g Styrian Golding Leaf (4.40% Alpha) @ 15 Minutes (Boil) (0.5 g/L)

Misc Bill
----------------
1/4 Protofloc Tablet @ 15 Minutes (Boil)

Single step Infusion at 65°C for 90 Minutes.
Fermented at 21°C with Wibblers Ale Yeast


Recipe Generated with BrewMate

[Dennis King]

I saw you put this recipe on Jim's, I'm thinking of brewing it myself this weekend.

Abbot-off!

I saw you put this recipe on Jim's, I'm thinking of brewing it myself this weekend.

The one on Jim's is as I got it from the ACB who got it from the GK ledger. The hop AA must have been good that year as it only requires 26g of both Fuggles and Goldings compared to my 38 and 40 amounts required now.

[Dennis King]

I saw you put this recipe on Jim's, I'm thinking of brewing it myself this weekend.

The one on Jim's is as I got it from the ACB who got it from the GK ledger. The hop AA must have been good that year as it only requires 26g of both Fuggles and Goldings compared to my 38 and 40 amounts required now.

It's the malt bill I'm more interested in, will use fuggles and EK and adjust to reach the correct bitterness.

I believe the original used Invert No. 1 whereas I'm still chomping through No. 3