The beer I never made.
Image by Thomas Cizauskas
This is a recipe I devised in the 1990s for an 8-US-barrel batch of ‘ordinary’ bitter, using a spreadsheet of my design. I never brewed it.
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⊲ If I were to brew it today, I might make a few ingredient changes.
☞ Honey malt in place of Munich malt.
☞ Maybe different hops, but keeping them noble lager hops or their new American analogs. (I’d want that lemony, fresh-grass aroma, without the grapefruit/tangerine/melon/cattiness of U.S./N.Z. ale hops)
☞ Swap the yeast for a more flavorful, less attenuative British yeast.
⊲ The Pilsner malt might add a touch of haziness, but that’s okay. This is an American bitter, after all. Likewise, use no sugar, but flaked maize, an American ingredient. It will act to dry the beer and accentuate the bittering hops, without adding any ‘corniness.’ And, please: boil the allotted time, if not more. Dimethyl sulfide (DMS), the aroma of cooked corn, derived from the pilsner malt (NOT the corn), has absolutely no place in this beer.
⊲ Serve the beer cask-conditioned (or tank-‘gespundet’) with NO EXTRANEOUS ingredients added. Just good, refreshing, flavorful, fresh, 3.7% alcohol-by-volume, American bitter.
⊲ And keep the name: Tom is Bitter Ale!
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⊲ Created with Lotus WordPro spreadsheet. Remember that?
⊲ The BU Balance was my adaptation of a measure created by Ray Daniels in his book, "Designing Great Beers."
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▶ Image by: Yours for Good Fermentables.
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