Pirate Honey Nut Brown Ale

[michaelsbagley]

This past weekend I went to help Nick out with his first batch of "mini-mashed" ale. He's brewed a few times before using kits, but this was his first attempt at bringing it up a notch. We had gone out a week or two ago to shop for all the ingredients, so it was just a case of mashing (steeping) the few whole grains in the recipe, and then boiling the rest of the ingredients.

He used the "Pirate Nut Brown Ale" recipe from the below book as his base, but reduced the amount of malt extract used to balance out the addition of three pounds of a really nice dark rich and flavourful honey.

Anyways, the recipe was actually chosen because it looked like the best nut brown ale recipe in that book, and not for the name... But the name is a nice bonus. This should be ready for drinking in about 3 weeks or so, I'll definately share my thoughts on it if Nick doesn;t come around to speak for himself.

Cheers.

[michaelsbagley]

So I spoke with Nick last night, and he had just finished the first racking of this ale. He said that while fermentation has settled dramatically by this point (8 days out) it has not stopped entirely. He also stated that the fermentation over the first three days was VERY turbulent, so violent it wound up blowing the airlock off a few times (likely because of the honey in my opinion).

Anyways, lastly he said the mostly fermented wort tasted amazing and that once this stuff is ready in a week or two it will likely be a really good ale. I'm probably going to loan Nick my Kegging gear for this batch so as to test it out and also give me a chance to learn to use it before I start on trying to recreat period ales (with the exception of using modern keggin on the period recipe).

[ns_477]

Well now that I'm home and finding myself totally swamped in all the stuff that didn't get finished before left, I'm planning on rebrewing the same batch as before, and also brewing it without the honey this time, to see what the main differance is going to be. If all goes according to plan (which it never does) Ill be brewing again in not time flat!

some pyraty sort of exclamtion!!!