21st August 2009 - Durden Park Simmonds Bitter

[Aleman]

This weekend I will be brewing this 1.062 bitter

88% Pale Malt
6% Amber Malt
5% Munich
1% Caramalt

Bittering Hops are Fuggles to 58IBU
With 6 IBU coming from the Goldings Late Hops

Which is recipe 7 Simmonds of Reading Bitter 1880, in the 3rd Edition of Old British Beers And How to Brew Them.

Unfortunately I will not be near a computer for the actual brew day but should be able to post some piccies . . . and possibly even a short video early next week.

 

[A T]

Look forward to it :thumb:

 

[Wez]

Hope you have a great one :thumb:

 

[Vossy1]

have a great brew day A
Had this recipe 'on the books' for a while...very tempted :hmm:
Fancy a bottle swap :P

 

[Rabmaxwell]

Aleman i might just steal your recipe :) i have wanted to make this beer for a while but making the pale amber malt has been putting me off.As for hopping i don't have any Fuggles for the bittering would Challenger be acceptable or would i be best just using all Goldings.The book calls for a dry hop addition are you going to dry hop too Aleman

 

[Aleman]

Aleman i might just steal your recipe :) i have wanted to make this beer for a while but making the pale amber malt has been putting me off.As for hopping i don't have any Fuggles for the bittering would Challenger be acceptable or would i be best just using all Goldings.The book calls for a dry hop addition are you going to dry hop too Aleman

Feel free to steal it, The substitutions for Pale Amber come from a post Geoff Cooper made to UK Homebrew in 2006, where he suggested that using Pale : Diastatic Amber : Munich in a 2:2:1 ratio should work to replace Pale Amber . . . He also suggested that using a bit of caramalt would also be good as it would add a touch of residual sweetness to the beer. I have tweaked the converted recipe a tad as I couldn't get hold of any diastatic amber (50 EBC rather than 70 EBC for colour) in the timescale.

Progress is a good replacement for Fuggles . . . Challenger would work but the final result would be a bit Goldingy, fuggles have more of an earthy bitterness.

Will probably dry hop . . . and then bottle the entire batch, or possibly split between two min cornii and dryhop bottle one batch, and drink the other.

 

[Aleman]

Well Here we go with the piccies . . . there are some more to come but these are mine.
The Grain bill

450Kg Pale (18 Sacks)
25Kg Amber (1 Sack)
25Kg Munich (1Sack)
12Kg Caramalt
Here is the copper - 18BBL

And here is the mash tun and 20BBL HLT, with its spinny sparger

And the rather fancy control panel

Crushing The Grain

Well not all of it it was only the Munich that was whole. And then here we are doughing in

And 21 Bags Later

Ok so that was a bit too easy . . . get on to breaking up those lumps.

While they were doughing in someone had to clean out the big copper

Before runningoff the wort as this was a partigyle we wanted to pump some of the first runnings to the small copper . . . which was in the 'old' brewery next door . . "Got Any O's?""

From the Mash Tun the wort runs off into this automatic underback

So from the grist we decided to run off about 2.5 BBL of the first runnings into the small copper and boil this down for a barley wine

. . . so using an approximation of double the hopping rate (.7668Kg/BBL)for the Simmonds bitter gives us 400g, 800g, 1200g, 1600g, 2000g And counting of Fuggles

Stir in the hops, and finally 3Kg of hops in for bittering . . . Just wait for it to reduce now.

Back to the big plant . . . We stopped the run off into the underback and reset all the piping . . . the wort at this stage is really sticky (OG 1.096) and very sweet . . . its hot too, so lets start filling the large copper

And at this pit some bright spark decided to ask the obvious question . . . is the hop filter in place? . . . Of course not

After the hop filter was expertly fitted by Phil, we continued to run off a considerable amount of wort, even when we had 14BBL at 1.051 in the copper we still had runnings of 5.2Brix . . . time to boil off some wort before adding the first lot of fuggles (8.8Kg!!) as we want to try and hit the target gravity of 1.062 In the meantime Phil pointed out that someone had to clean out the FV, Blink Bravely volunteed

Oh those 18BBL Fermenters have a ladder Inside! We then Got Carl to Dig out the Mash Tun

Once the FV was clean and we had boiled off the extra wort . . . plus adding the 8.8Kg of Fuggles for bittering and 2.2Kg of Goldings for Flavour we ran off the bitter wort to the FV

Phil had brewed 6BBL of mild on Monday, which was going to provide the yeast for the Simmonds Bitter . . .which mean it needed to be skimmed . . . as its a 6BBL brew in an 18BBL fermenter we needed a custom Skimming gadget to actually skim the yeast.

Which gave us 10Kg of nice yeast barm to pitch into the Simmonds

So here it is 14BBL at 1.057

 

[corby_brewer]

all i can say mate is BLOODY HELL.
Glad to see it all went to plan.

 

[tubby_shaw]

Big boys toys :mrgreen:
It must be an experience using so much malt and hops in one go :)

 

[Aleman]

Around 700 quids worth of ingredients in one go! (At 'trade' prices) . . . the one thing we proved was that the mash tun was way too big for the rest of the plant, for commercial beers anyway. The Tun wasn't full and the mash was fairly loose so we could very easily have got much more than 18BBL out of what we used . . .Adn I reckon we could have put another 150Kg of grain in the tun.

Keep a look out for Wibblers Crafty Badger if you are in the Essex area . . . should be available from grays and sons pubs . . . If not get the landlord to order it!!

Next year the Wibblers Rampant Rabbit should be available both on draft at a few Winterfests, and in bottle

 

[Oblivious]

That's just a fabulous brew day and a great beer i brew it last year

 

[jamesb]

Next year the Wibblers Rampant Rabbit should be available both on draft at a few Winterfests, and in bottle

:shock:

Diversifying eh?

 

[A T]

:shock: WOW, cool

 

[dandan]

WOW!!!!

Nice one!!! :thumb: :thumb:

 

[Bru4u]

Ohh My God, I've just wet myself.
That is seriously

 

[Oblivious]

Aleman has Wibblers recently up graded their brewing system and is a porter brewery installation?

 

[Wez]

Great pics Aleman :thumb:

 

[Aleman]

Aleman has Wibblers recently up graded their brewing system and is a porter brewery installation?

Yes the new plant was installed early in the spring, I don't think its a David Porter installation, as it has AB UK stamped all over it.

I do know Phil has asked David Porter about a Grist case Auger and Mash mixer though.

 

[Aleman]

Oh I forgot to mention . . . these Elements which you can just see here

Are 24 KiloWatts . . . . Each! . . . . And there is one in the HLT, and 2 in the Copper

 

[ano]

automatic underback

Great pics, thanks. What's an automatic underback? Does it help automatically fly sparge?