So I’ve bottled my latest foray into beer brewing. It shall be called “Black Dot Bitter,” because I marked the caps with a black dot to distinguish them from (the unmarked) bottles of my previous beer attempt.
I did some tasting as I was bottling, and it was very yummy. A little bit on the bitter side, even for an English Bitter-style beer. But there’s a considerable quantity of malty sweetness to counterbalance it. So I can’t say that that makes me unhappy.
This, as some of you may recall, is my first attempt at all-grain brewing. As in: I’ve done away with cans of pre-mashed malt syrup, and started instead from just malted barley. It is a considerably more involved process than starting from syrup. And there are some things, in retrospect, that I could have done better. But overall, I have to say that I’m really proud of the end result, and mean to try it again.
When it gets warmer, I think, I’m going to try a Belgian Trappist-style dubbel. Think Chimay Rouge, or the like.
Meanwhile, here’s my formula for Black Dot Bitter:
9.0 lb. Marris Otter Malt
0.5 lb. British Amber Malt
0.5 lb. British Crystal Malt 50L
1.0 oz. Northdown Hops
1.0 oz. Kent Golding Hops
Wyeast London Ale III (1318) Yeast
The specific gravity of the unfermented liquid was somewhere around 1.042.
And the final ABV is somewhere around 4%.