Two year old homebrew

Over two years ago I brewed a pale mild to a 1950s recipe. I didn’t like it much at the time, as it was very honeyish and a bit sickly. Visiting my mum last week I came across a left over bottle of the stuff.

Opened it up, fearing it would gush, but it didn’t. Whew, I calculated my priming sugar all right then. It was a bit spritzy, but not over-carbonated. It had the strong Ribena aroma of heavily oxidised homebrew, which I was expecting. It also had a very nice head, and is bright orange, which I wasn’t expecting.

Tasting it, it’s bone dry and rather reminiscent of Orval. Not as good as Orval, obviously, but in the same kind of style.  At the time my house yeast was Worthington White Shield yeast, which dries every beer out, so that shouldn’t be too surprising.

I still poured most of it away, but it was interesting to see the effect of time on a beer.

Oat ale demonstration

I will be at Locavore, a new hippie food shop on the south side, on Thursday 30th September, giving a brewing demonstration.

I have never done one of these on my own before so it’s likely to be fairly chaotic. I am trying to minimise the chaos by only making a small batch of about a gallon. This will also mean less waiting around for wort to come to the boil, etc. and I can do the boil in a jelly pan on the stove.

As it’s part of a series of events involving oats, I have to include oats in the beer somehow. Rather than do an oatmeal stout, which doesn’t really show off the oatiness (well, it does, but it’s overshadowed by the general stoutiness), I am thinking of a pale beer:

50% pale barley malt
20% oat malt
30% porridge oats

I will be using a grain bag, so am not concerned about the potential  stickiness of the mash. Dunno about hopping yet. I have some Hallertau and Bobek in the freezer. Yeast, well, I should probably get a starter going.