Drinking a beer is a great pleasure but drinking your own beer even more so. Brewlab is offering an easy route to home brewing with an expert guide and examples to follow.
Two beers and historic recreations produced as example recipes from “Home Brew. A Guide to Brewing Beer” are now available along with copies of “Home Brew” released in December 2022 by Crowood Press and written by Brewlab team – Keith Thomas, Brian Yorston and Julio Romero Johnson. This new and detailed text covers all aspects of home brewing along with 22 detailed recipes of 18 different styles.
Invaluable for new brewers, particularly if your Christmas included brewing equipment or a brew kit. The detailed and progressive text is also a great support to expand your brewing ambitions. Brewlab course director and past Black Sheep head brewer Phil Douglas notes “It can be difficult to anticipate and apply a home brew recipe. These examples provide direct guidance and targets to help develop your brewing skills – and produce some great beer.” Beers: Select from:
Pale Ale. 4.0% ABV. Original gravity 1.039, finishing gravity 1.008. Colour 13 EBC, Bitterness 30 EBU.
A richly hopped ale with complex citrus character persisting through to the aftertaste. Bitterness develops slowly to balance a smooth fruitiness progressing to a crisp finish.
Trappist Ale. 7.5% ABV. Original gravity 1.075, finishing gravity 1.016. Colour 53 EBC, Bitterness 35 EBU.
A strong version of a classic Belgium ale with robust bitterness and solid body. Malt and hops are carefully balanced to create a robust character typical of the style with spicy hop and fruit persisting in the finish.
Flag Porter. 5.0% ABV, 330ml.
A historic recreation of a Victorian porter using heritage malt varieties and fermented with a yeast recovered from a shipwreck. First brewed in 1987 Flag Porter began as a trial to recreate the lost porter style at a time when none were commercially available. The recovery of a bottle from an 1825 shipwreck in the English Channel allowed analysis to obtain a recipe and also to isolate a live yeast culture now used to mature the beer.
Currently brewed at Brewlab in Sunderland the beer is a brown porter with more malt character than later Victorian dark porters as well as a spicy fruit finish from the recovered yeast. Read more on Flag Porter at https://brewlab.co.uk/the-original-flag-porter-story/
Wallachia Stout. 6.5% ABV.
A companion to Flag Porter, Wallachia stout is an historic recreation of a Victorian Stout. Brewed with traditional UK malts and fermented with two yeast species recovered from a
shipwreck – the SS Wallachia which sank in the Firth estuary in 1895. Bottles recovered by Global Underwater Explorers were analysed by Brewlab to obtain the recipe used in the brew. Yeasts isolated from the bottles were cultured to inoculate the fermentation and provide its unique character. Analysis of DNA residues indicated the range of microorganisms present in the bottles which included lactic acid bacteria and fungi which may have grown in wooden casks. Further research is continuing to determine how these affect the beer’s fermentation.
Also brewed at Brewlab in Sunderland Wallachia is a strong, premium Scottish stout with solid body and rich malt balance.
Read further details of the Wallachia research at https://doi.org/10.1002/jib.641
Ends
Press release from Brewlab Ltd / Crowood Press. www.brewlab.co.uk https://www.crowood.com/
For media enquiries and high resolution images please call Keith Thomas on 07722 866799 or e mail keith.thomas@brewlab.co.uk.
Further links.
Home Brew. A Guide to Brewing Beer. https://brewlab.co.uk/product/home-brew-a-guideto-brewing-beer/
SS Wallachia. https://www.scottishshipwrecks.com/wallachia/
Global Underwater Explorers. https://www.gue.com/
Press release from Brewlab Ltd / Crowood Press. www.brewlab.co.uk https://www.crowood.com/
For media enquiries and high resolution images please call Keith Thomas on 07722 866799 or e mail keith.thomas@brewlab.co.uk.