Old Tom recipe

[An Ankoù]

All the recipes I find on the web have no wheat in them bar the Robinsons Brewery site which says has wheat....

That's interesting. Just looked at Protz' Almanac 1st and 5th editions and there's no mention of wheat. The brewery give little away, but they do say it contains wheat in their dietery guidelines. I'll bet that since halcyon malt is pretty scarce nowadays, they've lightened the brew with a bit of wheat to get some kind of flavour match with whatever they're using instead.

 

[NPi]

Let’s do the time warp agaaaaaain!
Welcome back to 2015 :)

Always pitched you for an AmDram fan

 

[peebee]

Odd that? I know there was dozen's of old "Old Tom" recipes on the Internet, but they all appear to have vanished?

Perhaps the Robinson's thought police have been wielding treats and purging references to their product on the Web? After all, it's the last decent beer they brew so they might have gone all protective? But what I remember of some older recipes (early 1920s) is they were 100% pale malt and OG1.096? I did think it odd that such a dark beer could result from lorry loads of pale malt and nothing darker.

I think those old recipes used just Goldings, but I have played with WGVs in a Marsden's Pedigree clone. They were a revelation! I knew the hops in Pedigree weren't Goldings but my guess a Fuggles didn't work right either. WGVs on the other hand

 

[chopps]

One of our fellow members used to work there and might have some insight…
@Obadiah Boondoggle

 

[Horners]

This was my clone

https://www.brewersfriend.com/homebrew/recipe/view/882085/old-tom
which was a) a great beer and b) a reasonable interpretation of the original.

Uses WGV and EKG as bittering hops and EKG as late addition. Part use of lager malt was to use it up and I think the carafa III was to adjust colour without introducing any harshness.