This is the second in a series of posts about the design of our new spring seasonal, Bad Egg.
We design our beers from a pilot scale of 5 imperial gallons on a homebrew setup that reasonably mirrors our 10-barrel (360-gallon) commercial operation. At the smaller scale, we lose some of the finer controls (eg, fermenter chilling), but otherwise the process is similar enough to yield reproducible results when we scale up to full production.
We start the process by determining the characteristics we are looking for in the beer: in this case, we're aiming to dial in the gravity (%abv), colour, the body and the hop. For this beer, we are looking for a 4.1% beer, red to brown in colour with reasonable malt body and a hop-forward finish.
Beer colour and body are functions of the type of grain we select for the beer. The backbone of the beer is still fine Norfolk-grown Maris Otter pale malted barley. Even a dark bitter will be more than 90% pale malt. This will be blended with colouring malts to make the malt bill, or grist. To get a beer in the reddish-brown spectrum, we're looking to use a combination of crystal, caramel and chocolate malts, all of which are roasted by different methods to yield different colours and characteristics. The colouring malts will also impart some non-fermentables which will contribute to the beer's body.
Each of these malts will contribute a particular amount of sugars, starches and proteins to the first stage of production, which is called the mash. To know how much malt you need, you need to know your brewery efficiency. This is how much of the full potential extract the brewery is typically able to realise in the mashing process. Our brewhouse efficiency is in the high 70% range. The rest of the sugars we can't recover go with the spent grain for animal feed. Our homebrew set-up gets a lower extraction efficiency than the commercial brewery, which has to be taken into account in formulating the recipe.
For this beer, we decided to aim for 5.5% colouring malts: 3% crystal, 2% cara and 0.5% chocolate. You can get carried away with dark malt pretty quickly and wind up with porter-dark beer, so we decided to start small in the first go.
For hops, we decided to go with 100% Goldings, with about 33 bittering units (pretty middle-of-the-road bitterness for a 4.1% beer), but with a big dose of aroma hops at the end. We're mashing on the hot side - about 154F (68C) to go for a bit of body. We're using our house English ale strain of yeast. And with these parameters we hatched the first candidate.
And how was it? Well, it wasn't a bad first effort. We didn't get as much volume as we were expecting, so it was a bit on the strong side, and it wasn't as dark as we are hoping for. The large dose of aroma hops made the beer aggressively bitter at first, but this faded after a week or two of maturing to leave a pleasant and drinkable beer. Not a release candidate, but it definitely gives us some pointers for the next round.
